Temporal Mechanics: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Paradox
by GWIect
Summary: In making Jack Harkness a fixed point, the Bad Wolf also made him a walking, talking, living paradox. By it's nature, this is a crossover story, but it is mainly a Jack/Ianto story and for a good long while the Doctor Who characters will only appear in interludes.
1. Prologue

**_PROLOGUE - Winning, Losing, and Starting Again._**

* * *

><p><em>"Yes... Cor, I suppose it makes sense." The War Doctor's eyebrows rose as he gazed down at his suddenly glowing hands, not much caring that his ship was traveling to a destination of her own choosing. "Wearing a bit thin..."<em>

_Looking up to the roof of the console chamber, he speaks aloud to his TARDIS as the regeneration energies begin to suffuse his body. "I hope the ears are a bit less conspicuous, this time..."_

* * *

><p>Minutes later, a new man is prone on the floor of the same chamber, unable to stop sobbing out his grief.<p>

The distinctive squeak of a door hinge interrupts his misery, and alerts him to another presence entering his ship. He looks up to see an attractive young man with impossibly old eyes looking down upon him with a set expression.

"Well, that'll teach you to be thinking about your ears when you regenerate, won't it Doctor?" The man asks, gracefully arching an eyebrow. "You can really only blame yourself for this one."

"How did you get in here?' The Doctor asks with a glare from his position on the floor, only slightly startled when his hoarse voice comes out sounding like an English Northerner, he ignores it to continue. "I don't know you. I don't want to know you. Just go away!"

"Well, that's very rude of you." The man replies, not seeming particularly offended, spinning on his heels and heading toward the door. "Up you get, then. I don't intend to put up with a rude Time-Lord parking his TARDIS in my guest room forever. Come along. What you need is a good cup of tea. All those tannins and free-radicals will help you get your head on straight again."

"I'm not going anywhere." The Doctor growled.

"I said, _get up_!" The man turned to narrow his eyes at the Time-Lord.

Without even realizing how, the Doctor found himself on his feet. He blinked at the young man, looked down at his new body dressed in near-rags, and back at the man in front of him.

"I don't suppose you'd mind giving me a moment to change first?" He finally asked, the fretful tone in his voice annoying him despite his inability to control his own emotions at the moment.

The man rolled his eyes, and cleared his throat meaningfully. Out of the corner of his eye the Doctor saw a flash and when he looked closer, there was now a full outfit; boots, leather jacket and all, sitting on the console next to him.

"Black for mourning. Yes, well I suppose it would be..." The man sighed softly, then turning again for the door he continued briskly. "Come out when you're presentable. She's not likely to let you run off after bringing you here, so no point trying. Kitchen is at the end of the hall on the left. I'll just start the water boiling."

"How did you..?" The Doctor began.

"Gorgeous ship you have, Doctor." The man tossed over his shoulder, as he exited the TARDIS. "I think she rather likes me..."

* * *

><p><em>Author's Note: There is such a lovely amount of blank space between the Doctor's regeneration from the Hurt Doctor to when the Eccleston Doctor met Rose. When I saw the 50th anniversary special, I couldn't help but take advantage of all that unknown time to further fill out the timelines in the Torchwood AU story I've been quietly working on for years. It was inspirational, and gave me a starting point I hadn't come up with yet that wound up affecting the entire story. Kind of like the butterfly effect in time-travel, the short scene you've just read forced the re-writing of thousands of words I'd already completed. I suppose only Time will tell if it was worth it.<em>


	2. Chapter 1

_"I remember...I remember..." - Gwen Cooper, Everything Changes_

* * *

><p>After some careful maneuvering, Jack collected Susie's bag and weapon, gathered the upset and obviously shocky PC into his arms, and then both of them onto the lift step. He avoided looking too closely at Susie's body, just yet. He still couldn't quite credit that she had been murdering people. Not the Susie he'd known…<p>

He activated the lift, glad that the Cooper seemed to be in a state of shock that precluded hysterical sobbing. He'd held sobbing women in his arms before, but he by far preferred that particular situation to include less clothing, and more moaning.

Once they had cleared the upper reaches of the Hub, he looked down and was surprised to see Ianto making his way over to meet them.

"Ianto?" Jack said as he stood on the descending lift, with what he was already considering his newest Torchwood recruit in his arms. "I thought you were..."

"Couldn't sleep. Decided to do some sorting of the mess the London items are still in." Ianto said, eyeing the silent PC. "What's happened?"

"Susie's…" Jack couldn't help his eyes flicking up toward the roof and the pavement of the Centre above them.

"The glove did something to her." Ianto said with his usual perception. "She's the one…"

"Yes." Jack answered shortly, as the lift reached the main level. "All plans for tonight are officially canceled, I need to get back upstairs and take care of…"

"Understood, sir." Ianto said, and took a step forward to reach his hand out and place it on the PC's still shuddering shoulder. "C'mon then, lets get you settled down with a nice cup of tea, and you can tell me about it, yeah?"

Despite his surprise at seeing Ianto reach out to comfort the woman so easily, Jack noted that when he'd begun speaking to Cooper, his accent had deepened just the slightest bit, softening the vowels in a musical way that always made Jack need to take a deeper breath when Ianto used it, as Cooper raised her head to gaze wide-eyed at the young man.

"No more pills in my drink, thank you…" Cooper said, still not calmly, but with a degree of inner strength that Jack admired.

"No, just a nice hot cuppa with plenty of sugar. You're in shock, and it will help." Ianto glanced at Jack, as he took Cooper's hand, and helped her down, tucking her arm into his. They stood looking as proper as a Victorian couple, but Jack knew Ianto was supporting most of her weight on his arm, as they both turned to look at him.

Jack smiled slightly, and shook his head. "Don't worry about the debrief, Ianto. If you can just get her settled down with a blanket and tea on the couch and keep an eye on her. I'd like you to call Tosh and Owen and tell them if they have anything whatsoever that shouldn't have left the base, to get it and bring it in, please. Tonight. Don't say anything about Susie, I'll explain when they get in, and if you have anything…" Jack pressed the button that began the lift moving upwards again, knowing he didn't need to finish the half-question.

"I don't." Ianto told him, guiding Cooper away toward the grubby couch, as the lift began rising behind them he raised his voice to be heard over the mechanism. "There's nothing belonging here that I have the slightest interest in taking home with me."

"Well, now that's a lie, and we both know it…" Jack called down to him from midway up to the roof, with a laugh.

"Time and a place, Captain." Was the stern remonstrance he heard called back, just before he reached the roof, and lost sight of them.

* * *

><p>Ianto guided the PC to the couch, and got her settled as best he could. He hurried down the stairs to the medical bay, grabbed a woolen blanket from a cupboard, and brought it back up to find her gazing with confused eyes up to where the Captain had disappeared again through the roof.<p>

"Did he..?" She trailed off and turned to meet his eyes.

"Yes, he was flirting with me." Ianto knew he wasn't answering the question she was really asking him, "Happens quite often, but he's no more gay than I am…"

Cooper looked at him perceptively, despite the shock he knew she was in, which forced him to raise his estimation of her when she took his cue and ran with it. "That's a misleading answer, since I don't know how gay you might be…"

Ianto's lips twitched into a smirk before he could control it, and he shrugged at her slightly. "It's the closest to an answer to your question you're likely to get from anyone. If you really want to know, you'll have to ask him yourself."

She contemplated that response, as he tucked the blanket around her shoulders carefully, and then nodded in acceptance. "I know you offered tea, but you wouldn't happen to have any coffee instead, would you?"

"Oh, I think I might be able to find something that will suit." Ianto smiled, straightening from the crouch he'd taken next to her. He could already feel that she'd be quick to recover from her shock, and he was inclined to think that the Captain was correct about this PC Cooper; she was going to fit in just fine.

* * *

><p>Gwen Cooper sat in something of a daze, sipping the absolutely heavenly coffee the young man in the gorgeous pinstripe suit had provided her… He really did look good in the suit.<p>

_Jones_; that was his name she remembered now. Ianto Jones. The only Welsh member of Torchwood, by his accent and that ubiquitous Welsh name...

She realized now that after Harkness's almost dismissive introduction she hadn't even remembered Jones enough to mention him in the note she'd tried to write herself when Harkness had drugged her.

She couldn't understand how she had managed that, or maybe she could… Jones had a way about him; despite his attractive looks and the lovely suits, he just sort of melted into the background…

By the look of the way he and Captain Harkness seemed to work together like a choreographed pair of dancers, he did more than 'clean up, and make sure they got everywhere on time' for Torchwood, or at least for Captain Harkness. She also couldn't shake the feeling that Jones had seen everything that happened on the Plass above, and hadn't seemed even the slightest bit surprised. He'd fobbed off her tentative questions with that transparent misdirection about Harkness flirting, but she'd taken the warning for what it was and simply watched them.

The woman… _Susie's_ body had been carried down on the lift by Harkness. Jones had handed Gwen her promised cup of coffee in passing, as he pushed a gurney with a white PVC bag on it over for the Captain to place their former teammate inside. There was whispered conversation, glances in her direction as Harkness removed his heavy woolen coat and the jacket underneath handing them to Jones along with the bag Susie had carried, then began absently rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. Harkness shrugged, and nodded at something Jones said while staring down at the face of the dead woman expressionlessly. Jones rested a hand on the Captain's forearm, and Harkness looked up sharply at whatever the suited young man said to him that time, then his eyes softened as he nodded again, raising his own hand to rest on the side of the younger man's neck for a long moment, before sliding it over his shoulder and down the suited arm while Jones ducked his head almost shyly.

The entire interaction had confused her, the touches weren't sexual, they were almost _brotherly_, except that the way Harkness watched Jones walk away towards Harkness's own office was anything but, at least until he'd caught her observing. At which point he'd flashed her a flirty grin before seeming to remember himself; looking back down at the body with a sigh that made his shoulders slump as they had before Jones had initiated the contact, he pushed the gurney down a ramp and out of sight.

Then she realized; Jones had comforted him, and he'd accepted it, but like Schrodinger's cat it had been killed by observation, and now that moment of distraction Jones had given Harkness was gone. She could have kicked herself, until she remembered that the man she was empathizing with had cheerfully drugged her only the night before.

For a time she wondered if she'd been drugged again, because the hazy confusion she was in felt like it, but no… _Shock_, Jones had said; and she knew the symptoms well enough for herself. Besides, watching a man be shot in the head, then arise again like Lazarus should be more than enough, without having discovered the serial killer the police had been searching for, nearly being shot herself, then watching the murderer suicide…

Definitely shock, she confirmed to herself, fingering the edge of the woolen blanket around her shoulders.

"Owen and Tosh are on their way in." Jones called to Harkness from the office, just as the Captain made his way back into the area that seemed to be the main workspace. Gwen wasn't sure how he'd known that his leader was within hearing distance, because the sightline between them was completely blocked, but neither of them seemed to notice the oddity as she had.

"You told them to…"

"I told them. Neither would admit to anything specific, so I had to mention there'd been an incident and the order was a direct result. I left out any mention of whom the incident pertained to…"

"Perfect. Thank you, Ianto." Harkness sighed, and leaned against the railing outside his office, he was staring down toward where she'd seen Susie working the night before. "Get a containment box ready for me as well, would you? Secure Archives, NFU."

"Just the one?"

"I think I'll choose to presume that the other two wouldn't take anything too dangerous out into public, until they prove me wrong."

"For what it's worth, I'm fairly sure your faith is justified," Jones said, finally making his way out to lean against the doorway of the office. "Only things I've noticed missing are that harmless translation device that Tosh was so fascinated by when it came in last week, and the pheromone spray Owen was supposed to be testing on rats. I think he's jealous of your cologne…"

"You know I never wear any…"

"At the moment you're wearing the slight tic beside your left eye that denotes a developing migraine," Jones replied dryly. "I've left a cup of coffee and two paracetamol waiting on your desk. Go try to relax a moment to let them work, before it gets so bad you bite both their heads off when they get here."

"I would call you a mind reader, but if you were really doing that it wouldn't be coffee and painkillers on my desk, right now…"

"I'm afraid that particular thought will have to go the way of any other plans we all had. Owen will need to examine Susie, if only for the official record. Tosh is going to have some work ahead of her making sure that the situation is contained, and you still have PC Cooper to debrief."

Gwen had been so caught up in eavesdropping on their conversation that she started a bit when they both looked directly at her, and all she could do was blink at them.

"Jack, I'm perfectly capable…" Jones began, softly, but Harkness interrupted him with a sharp shake of his head, and then a wince.

"No, I'll speak with her after Owen and Tosh get here and get started. Until then, you never fail to notice when my head seems to think it's supposed to be split down the middle. Your coffee, a couple painkillers and a few moments with my eyes closed will set me right. Just…keep an eye on her, make sure breaking the Retcon hasn't done her any damage, please."

"I'll take care of her." Jones nodded and squeezed Harkness's shoulder as he stepped past him, then went down the stairway and crossed to where Gwen sat.

Gwen continued to watch Harkness, as his eyes followed Jones across the main area, the same emotion she'd seen before was in his eyes, only this time he turned away without acknowledging her observation, and made his way into the office behind him and out of sight.

"How are you feeling, Miss Cooper?" Jones asked, crouching down beside her as he had earlier. He looked genuinely concerned for her, and she couldn't help but believe that he was.

"Call me _Gwen_, please." She told him with a weak smile, and then answered. "Bit better, the coffee was lovely… Best I've ever had, really."

"I get that a lot around here," he shrugged with a wry smile, and she raised a jaded eyebrow, but he only rolled his eyes. "I make the _coffee_ for _everyone_. We have a professional machine, but somehow amidst all this advanced technology, I'm the only one willing to admit being able to get the thing to work properly. I spent a bit of time at uni working as a barista in a gourmet cafe for pocket money. So, now they're all utterly spoiled."

"I remember the others now, Owen is the doctor… Toshiko is the computer specialist, Susie… I guess she was second…and Harkness is obviously the leader, but all I know about you is that you're younger than the rest, really do look good in a suit, and worked as a barista. Why are you here?"

"Susie was a very accomplished mechanical engineer, specializing in weapons. As for me, you'll have to come and see, maybe you can figure it out for yourself. You're quite good at that…" Jones rose from his crouch, and held out his hand to her. "We've time before the others will be able to make it in, and the Captain needs a bit of time to himself, so I can take you down to my domain, and show you around a bit. I need to go down there to find a containment unit."

Gwen took his hand, and stood, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders. She felt better, not recovered really, but better by the moment. So when she tucked her arm into his this time, it wasn't for support, it was because she rather enjoyed the touch of old-fashioned manners it embodied.

"Where are you from, then?" Gwen asked, as they made their way down a hallway. "Somewhere nearby?"

"You could say that," He smiled slightly, "Where would your first guess be?"

"Somewhere posh…" Gwen said, wrinkling her nose in thought. He reminded her a bit of Vaughn, who she knew had grown up moneyed, who had worked her way up to head dispatcher because she enjoyed the job, not because she needed to. "Bit posher than me, at any rate."

"You'd be wrong there, love." His accent suddenly changed entirely, sounding like any one of the obnoxious young punters she'd dealt with after an exciting game on the pub telly riled them up. "Estate boy, through and through, I am. Come up on the streets a' Cardiff. M' sister and 'er man've two kids still out to one of the council estates not far offa where we come up at."

"Oh, you bugger!" She laughed, realizing he'd led her right into that one, and appreciating it.

"I got out on my own merits." Jones said, smiling. His voice back to the posher tones that he seemed to use in his daily life. "I probably didn't sound quite that bad even growing up. My sister still does, though I love her all the more for never being ashamed of our roots. I was never as comfortable there, I just didn't fit in. Got into some trouble at times, trying. I was a scholarship boy, though; public schools then on to Oxford. Double Honours in Linguistics and History. Spoke seven languages when I was recruited by Torchwood London just out of school. I got my masters in Linguistics in my first year with them, and also learned three more non-terrestrial languages to bring me up to ten."

"Local boy made very, _very_ good then?" Gwen smiled encouragingly. "I begin to see where you fit in with the rest here, I think."

"Not really." He shrugged. "Apart from one specific area here, I'm just what the Captain described me as. I clean up their messes, make sure they get everywhere they need to be, make the coffee, and keep them all fed. Not a one of them actually realizes that I'm as much a genius in my own field as the rest. Not even the Captain. I rather enjoy them all underestimating me, mind? So don't go ruining my fun. I'm counting on your Welsh honour and fellowship, aye?"

"Oh, _aye_!" She agreed with a giggle, as he stopped them before one of the doors seemingly identical to all the ones they'd passed in the otherwise empty hallways. Gwen thought they must be several levels down from the main one where the rest did their work. "I'm counting on your Welsh honour and fellowship not to be leading me to some dank place I'll never be heard from again, at the moment. So if yours proves out, I promise mine will, yeah?"

"Well, I wouldn't count on finding my way out on your own from this maze, but since I doubt the rest could either, you're in good company." He laughed, "Just don't go wandering and I'll make sure you don't get lost forever in the bowels of the Hub."

He reached out to a pad on the wall, and punched in a very long series of numbers she couldn't follow, and the door clanked as some interior lock released.

"In here, you'll find the one place where I am absolute king of my Torchwood domain. Other than the coffee station, that is." With that pronouncement, he opened the door and stepped aside to let her precede him.

Gwen stepped in and looked around, and her eyes widened to see shelf after heavily laden shelf going back into the far distance.

"This is the secure archives for Torchwood Cardiff." Jones told her, with pride. "Other than Captain Harkness, no one else knows the code to enter this room; though he was more than happy to pass it on to me when I expressed an interest in doing some organizing down here. He is probably the least organized man I've ever met, so it gives him horrors to think about this room. More than two hundred years of the most dangerous items dropped through the rift and collected by Torchwood. There's no one else here with the knowledge and expertise to safely handle, organize, and account for what's in this room. Doing so was a major part of my job in London, and our archives there were even more extensive than Cardiff's. When Canary Wharf fell, I came here because I knew someone needed to be able to make sure that the things rescued from the wreckage were properly taken care of. Right now we're only here to get this…"

Jones reached down to a pile of empty strong-boxes stacked along the interior wall and took one, then reached to a shelf above and took a large lock to go with it.

"I brought you with me to show you that despite Susie, despite the minor borrowing that Owen and Tosh have let themselves be tempted into, there are two people who take the dangerous items the rift dumps on our heads very seriously." He told her, with a solemn expression. "The things in this room aren't for the hands of anyone, and once they're placed here they do not leave unless the person who requests them fills out forms that would daunt a barrister specializing in tax law, and if they can't justify their request it is summarily refused. What happened to Susie…it was one part her, one part the glove, and one part the Captain, he knows it. So, keep that in mind when you think about what happened tonight and what led up to it. Susie was our teammate; she was a good woman before she was seduced by something none of us understood into letting out that dark side that every human being has. That's the risk we all take, and it's the thing we all fight hardest against every day. Curiosity is in all our natures, or we wouldn't be here. The important thing is to realize when that need to know things is leading you toward something that you might not be able to recover from."

* * *

><p>"I think I understand you now." Gwen said, as they made their way back through the halls.<p>

"Do you?" He said, glancing at her without stopping.

"You're the one who takes care." She said, feeling quite positive that she finally had a good read on him. "You've seen things the others haven't, yet. Even if they don't realize it. So, you take care of all of them, and everything else that needs it. You worked in London, and both you and Harkness have told me now that it fell. Canary Wharf, you said. I saw what must have been the cover story, and it was bad enough. Whatever really happened must have been so much worse. They let their need to know things go too far. They didn't take enough care of what they were doing, and of each other, and it destroyed them, and you were there, weren't you?"

"Yep." His answer was short and she sensed that the subject wasn't one he was willing to elaborate on.

"The others might not get it…" She stopped, forcing him to stop with a hand on his arm, waiting for him to turn and make eye-contact before she continued. "The others might not get it, but Harkness does. He sees you. Or at least if he doesn't quite yet, he really, _really_ wants to."

Jones looked at her, and for a moment, no more than an instant, she thought she saw panic in his eyes, before it changed into contemplation. Finally he nodded.

"Yeah, you really are quite good, Gwen Cooper." He smiled at her, but it wasn't a happy smile. "What you don't know is that I was given retirement from Torchwood with full lifetime pension and no prejudice after Canary Wharf. I could have traveled the world, gone back to school, eventually even taken a professorship, or gone into some other field entirely. I'm certainly young enough, aye? Instead of doing any of those things, I came here. Back to the danger, back to the adrenaline. I'm no better than the rest in that. I'm just that slightest bit more careful, because I've already walked through the hell that can come when our reach_ far_ exceeds our grasp. That's what Jack Harkness sees when he looks at me, but in the end he'll only be disappointed because what he's looking for is someone who hasn't been tainted by Torchwood, and that's not _me_."

He strode forward again, and she stood for a moment before she remembered his warning about finding her way alone, and hurried to catch up. She took his arm again in the same old-fashioned way he'd offered it before.

"So…" She said, and turned her head to eye him speculatively, "What are all those languages, then?"

She actually felt the sigh of relief he gave that she'd changed the subject, and mentally patted herself on the back for it.

"English and Welsh, obviously." He told her with a sideways smile then continued. "French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Hindi."

"Well, you must be the best dinner date. Never have to worry about not being able to read the menu, do you..?" Gwen counted that up in her head, and then looked at him curiously, "Wait, that's more than the seven you said…"

"Ten, I said." He smirked, "The last three are the non-terrestrial ones. _Alien_ languages."

"But…no."

"Torchwood once had an outpost in India for a reason, and how did you think the Greek got so advanced for their time? And well, those _Portuguese_…not much needs to be said _there_." He shook his head with a frown.

"No…_Really?_"

"_No._" He laughed at what she could only think was her flabbergasted expression. "I did learn them since I started with Torchwood, but they're extras I picked up because the archives had records written in them, and I was curious to know why. The three non-terrestrial languages I speak are Vinvocchi, because we seem to have had a number of them visiting Earth over the years. They seem to be mostly scientists, the way anthropologists study tribes on an isolated island. Not interfering, just observing to learn about us. Then there are two languages that were entirely accidental. They're the main two languages from a single planet that we happened to come across some sort of teaching device for, and since I was the new language specialist, I got first crack at figuring it out. Pushed a button I shouldn't have; full dump of both languages all at once into my head. I had a banging headache for a week, but eventually sorted it all out. I figured out it was supposed to work that way. Something that race gives to traders and tourists who visit their planet, when they're sending along what passes for their travelers' visa; one time use, but no worry about a language barrier. I was very sad to find out that item didn't make it through the fall of London; I was sort of hoping someone would come along who could reverse-engineer it, and figure out how to set them for other languages. I think Tosh might have been able to make a good try at it."

"Oi! Harkness!" A cockney voice sounded along with the blaring alarms Gwen's still foggy memories associated with the door as Gwen and Ianto made their way into the main workspace. "Why've you got the Teaboy calling us in at the arse-end of the night!?"

"Bloody Owen…" Ianto muttered, rolling his eyes in a show of annoyance that Gwen thought was probably something he wouldn't show to the doctor directly.

"Owen, something's _happened_…" Gwen heard the voice of the Japanese technician next. "I was here before you. Jack's in his office with the blinds shut, and Suzie and Ianto are nowhere to be found…"

"Ianto's probably in there with _Jack_…" Owen said, salaciously. "Maybe Susie, as well. She _can_ be a right…"

"_You're_ a right _idiot_, Owen…" Ianto interrupted him sharply; as he escorted Gwen up the steps they'd paused at upon hearing the others. "I told you there's been an incident…"

"_Incident_ is _one_ way to put it…" Harkness said, from the doorway to his office, where he stood observing them all. "In here. Now."

Harkness spun in place and left the doorway, and Gwen looked to Ianto wondering if they were meant to be included in that order and he nodded slightly.

He escorted her up the stairs to the Captain's office ahead of the other two, and took her over to the side near some filing cabinets where he left her with a nod, and moved to stand next to the Captain, placing the box he'd brought upstairs on the desk as the other two filed in.

"Thought he Retconned her..?" Gwen heard the doctor mutter to the petite technician who frowned and shushed him, her eyes were on the desk and Gwen followed her gaze, only to shudder as she saw the ugly metal glove and its companion knife laid out openly.

"Where's Susie?" Toshiko asked softly, her eyes still on the glove.

"Dead." Harkness bluntly informed them. "She shot herself rather than be taken into custody when the fact she'd been murdering people to have subjects to test the glove was discovered."

"Bloody…" Owen gasped, and fell back a bit to lean against the wall behind him.

Toshiko huddled deeper into her coat, with a sad look on her face. "You're sure it was…" She said, looking to Harkness as if she expected him to somehow make it untrue.

"PC Cooper broke the Retcon, figured it out, and came back here." Harkness nodded in her direction. "Suzie was about to kill her and run, but I stopped her and that's when she shot herself. Owen, I need you to do an exam. I don't think there's a need for a full autopsy, it's fairly obvious how she died. Just sign off on the report so I can put her to rest. Toshiko, I need you to go into the police systems and figure out some way to clean this mess up. I don't want someone else being arrested for Susie's crimes, but we need this buried. Figure it out. Ianto..?"

"The only items still missing from our archives are the pheromone spray, and the text scanner." Ianto said solemnly, and Gwen realized he wasn't reminding Harkness of what he'd told him before. Harkness had intended the younger man to give him the opening and Ianto had done so without a word needing to be spoken between the two.

"The glove seemed harmless enough, too." Harkness said softly, his eyes resting on the glove and knife, and then his voice hardened as he transferred his gaze to the two agents. "Neither it nor the knife should have ever left the base, but they did, and innocent people died. I want those items on my desk in the next five minutes, or Torchwood will be down a couple more operatives before tonight is over."

As his voice echoed off the glass walls of the office, Ianto began silently packing away the glove and knife into the containment box, closing and locking it, and then he carried it to an odd sort of dumbwaiter in the wall. He input a code into the pad next to the dumbwaiter, and it opened to show a lighted interior that he placed the box inside.

As he turned to look back at Harkness, first Toshiko and then Owen pulled out the mentioned items, and placed them on the Captain's desk.

"Alright, get to work." Harkness said. He didn't acknowledge the return of the two items, or the two who had taken them. He looked instead to Ianto, who nodded and took the two items from the desk and left through a second exit, going back downstairs Gwen assumed, to put them away wherever they were supposed to be.

Owen and Toshiko left the room as well, and split in different directions presumably to begin taking care of the things he'd asked them to do, as Gwen stood silently in the corner.

"Let's take a walk." The Captain said to her, and walked to the corner of the room where he took his jacket and heavy coat from the stand, donning them quickly. "I know a good spot to watch the sunrise…"

"Alright…" She said, following his long strides out of the office and down the stairs, but then hesitated. "May I..?"

"Problem?"

"I'd like to say thank you and goodbye to Ianto, before I go…" She told him, with a shrug. "He's been very kind, and I know it can't have been an easy night to entertain an hysterical woman..."

"That's a nice thought, but it won't be necessary." The Captain said, and took her arm to steer her through the cog-door and into the lift. "Besides, you're about as un-hysterical a woman as I can imagine, under the circumstances. I doubt he found you a trial."

"He was lovely, keeping me distracted..." She said, with a sigh. "For seeming so solemn at first, he's a sense of humor on him, he does..."

"Have you got a crush on my general support man, PC Cooper?" The Captain raised an eyebrow and glanced at her with a half-smile.

"Well, I wouldn't want to step on any toes…" She replied archly, matching his raised eyebrow.

"He's had some trouble with that; we had to change where we order our curry 'cause after he joined us the delivery girl would never leave before the food got cold…" The Captain chuckled as the lift doors opened, and he stepped out striding down the hallway.

It wasn't an admission, but it wasn't a denial either.

They were certainly of a like, the Captain and Ianto. Talk your ear off while still being silent as the grave where it counted. Gwen shook her head, and followed the Captain once again.

* * *

><p><em>Author's Note: And so it begins. As I hopefully made fairly obvious, this chapter slots into the missing chunk of time between Susie shooting herself on the Plass, and the scene where Owen and Tosh have obviously been called in to be told about the incident (to steal a phrase from Ianto), and turn in their borrowed tech. I always thought it was interesting that despite him being prominently shown putting away the Glove and Knife into the Secure Archives, Gwen doesn't mention Ianto when she notes the fact that Jack didn't tell Owen and Toshiko about the fact that Susie shot him in the head. That glaring omission is why I decided to base most of this chapter in her POV. She's still an outsider at this point, which makes her more inclined to notice subtle clues in the behavior of Jack and Ianto that the others might miss due to daily exposure. Even ones that Jack himself might not actually notice. I also wanted her to see that Ianto isn't entirely the martinet that he pretends to be around the others. In my opinion, Gwen never really fit the whole "Heart of Torchwood" moniker as much as she fit "The One Who Questions Everything". Really, she always asks the difficult questions, and makes the others think about things they'd sometimes rather not. I actually like that about her, so it's the trait I've chosen to focus on for her in this fic. She'll still have her moments, she wouldn't be Gwen Cooper if she didn't, but I find myself enjoying writing her when I take it from that perspective, so I hope you guys wind up enjoying reading her, too.<em>

_Also, I kinda hand-waved the scene with Jack placing Susie's body in storage. It just seemed slightly out of order when you consider the situation. Like they had to shoehorn that scene in there before the final scene on the roof because it was necessary, but it . If you think about it, he wouldn't have had time to do that until much later, probably after the final scenes on the show. Otherwise, what is Gwen doing for that time, just wandering around unsupervised while the others get things done? Taking coffee-making lessons from Ianto? So, I just left it off, and we can all pretend that after he made sure she got home without falling off that roof, Jack came back and took care of it._


	3. Chapter 2

_"Travel halfway across the universe for the greatest sex...Still end up dying alone."_ - Captain Jack Harkness, Day One

* * *

><p>Jack looked up to see Ianto enter the office and smiled.<p>

"I thought I told everyone to go home." He said, leaning back in his chair to watch as Ianto made his way around the desk, and leaned over to gather up the paperwork Jack had been filling out.

"_Actually_, you told Owen to go out and have a drink, Toshiko to go catch up on all the sleep she missed while we were short-staffed, and Gwen to go have lasagna with her boyfriend. _In fact_, it seems you went to each individual member of the team to send them off early, _except_ for me." Ianto said, with an ironic smile as he set the small pile of papers on the opposite edge of the desk.

"Must have slipped my mind…" Jack stood, and took a step toward where Ianto stood. "_Would_ you like to go home early, Ianto?"

"No…" Ianto said musingly, standing his ground as Jack took another step forward. "I think I'd rather see what a buzz I'd get from the rest…"

"_Jealous_..?" Jack tisked, smiling as he reached out to slide his hand down the lapel of Ianto's jacket until he reached the buttons, "I only kissed her to save her _life_, you know…"

"Oh, I know…" Ianto smiled back at him. He grasped Jack's suspenders and turned them in place so that the desk was at Jack's back, leaning in until his lips barely brushed Jack's as he continued. "Besides, an alien that feeds off sexual energy finds its way to Cardiff? It's just a wonder it didn't attack _you_ on _sight_…"

* * *

><p>"Gwen asked us all what we do to relax, earlier…" Jack said, reaching up to put one bare arm under his head, the other hand stroked the arm slung across his waist soothingly.<p>

"And you said, 'I wait till you've all gone home, then let Ianto bend me over my desk and fuck me until I scream his name, and then we delete the internal CCTV.'?" Ianto said into Jack's shoulder, his voice sounding gratifyingly sated.

"Well, I left out the bit about the CCTV." Jack smirked. "No, actually I don't think any of us knew quite how to answer that question.

"She's good at those sort of questions." Ianto agreed.

"That sounds like experience, speaking." Jack told him. "What did she ask you?"

"She asked me why I'm here..." Ianto said, yawning. "Meaning what my job is, but she was really asking why I do it. I told her she'd have to figure that one out on her own."

"And…did she?" Jack asked, curiously. He had asked himself the same question, at times.

"She came closer than any of the rest of you has managed, so far." Ianto told him. "She said I'm the one who takes care. Of you, of the team, of all the things that need taken care of..."

"You're right, she is good." Jack mused.

"Still needs training…" Ianto mumbled, and glancing down Jack could see his eyes were closed. "Tossed her off the docks…"

"She swims pretty well." Jack murmured, smiling softly.

"Not fair to the others." Ianto told him, and Jack was impressed he was so coherent, but he'd noticed Ianto had surprising mental reserves.

"No, you're right…" Jack agreed. "I'll take care of it. Sleep, Ianto. You've missed as much as Tosh, lately. I promise I can survive your snoring…"

"Don' snore..." Ianto muttered. "Kick, Lisa says…"

Jack didn't respond, and Ianto finally dozed off entirely. Jack knew that last had been almost unconscious, because Ianto never spoke of the girlfriend he'd lost at Canary Wharf after the single time he'd made a point to tell Jack she was deceased. Jack respected loss too much to push, however curious he might be.

One day, when Ianto was ready, Jack would be there to listen.

Ianto was asleep now, and Jack should get out of bed and go do something around the hub, or wander around Cardiff… Sometimes on his night strolls he ran across a Weevil before it had a chance to cause trouble... With a different lover he'd have been gone before now.

Ianto was a light sleeper; he'd never yet spent the night in Jack's bed. The few times they'd made it this far in the first place, he'd either insisted on leaving, or Jack had tried to get up without waking him and failed. Once he awoke again, Jack knew from experience that Ianto would get out of bed, and most likely do without. If Jack stayed, he would at least be able to catch a few more hours of the sleep he had missed of late.

Jack didn't sleep much anymore. He thought maybe there was too much of that strange energy running through him most of the time, but he did know a few exercises that would let him fall into a sort of trance-state he sometimes used in place of sleep when he needed to let his mind rest and sleep wouldn't come. If he could meditate, he wouldn't feel compelled to get out of bed, and he wouldn't wake his young lover out of the sleep he needed. He felt relaxed enough, here and now. He should try.

Jack closed his eyes.

He opened them again to find himself surrounded by fire. Chaos, bone-deep pain that he couldn't identify. Fear that he could, and yet couldn't put a name to. He was disoriented enough at first that he didn't realize he was moving until he felt himself look around, searching for something, and realized what he had fallen into the middle of.

He was dreaming, but Jack didn't dream when he meditated.

It wasn't his dream.

As soon as the realization struck Jack, it was gone.

Instead he moved almost silently around a darkened room, barely enough light spilling around the closed curtains to see where the furniture was. He dressed quickly, eyes adjusting to the darkness and before leaving walked to the occupied side of the bed, and lightly kissed the forehead of a beautiful dark-skinned woman he'd never seen before. Murmuring words of love, smiling when she smiled and mumbled his name in her sleep, she was a lithe body covered in only a sheet and so tempting it took all his will to walk away. He left the room, and the flat that contained it, and then he was on the streets of London. He had a gun tucked into the back of his jeans, cuffs and a trank in his jacket pocket. He was hunting something. What it was, he couldn't have said, but it had caused too much trouble and he knew the others wouldn't be able to catch it unless he went along, but regulations said he couldn't go… So, he went alone without telling anyone. Always easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission…_ Couldn't sleep, ma'am, so I was out for a walk and it just…appeared._ Homing in on his quarry, Jack couldn't understand how but it was the only description that fit, he finally flushed it out and after a short struggle that left him bruised and tired but somehow miraculously not injured despite a significant difference in size and physical strength, the bestial alien was captured. Captured intentionally; not killed Jack realized. It would have been considerably safer to simply shoot the alien; its first attack had left it wide open. The thought that it might be far kinder to have killed the alien drifted across his mind, and then he sighed. It was too late for that mercy and a pair of operatives and several civilians had died already. It was only a Weevil, thank god. The only thing they'd be interested in was how it made its way from Cardiff all the way to London. So, he made the call, and arranged pickup; _Torchwood Authorization: Jones, Ianto - 7966472-Sigma-Alpha-1. Yeah, I was out for a walk, and it seems our street predator thought I'd make a good midnight snack. No. I'm fine, just need a ride in. Imagine dragging an unconscious alien down High Street might put off the tourists..._ Time to beg forgiveness…

The scene changed again in a blink. Darkness, quiet even, only dim emergency lighting and bare walls to see, but again chaos raged in ways that Jack couldn't comprehend. Locked in, all he could do was wait as the world ended above his head. Something unrecognized but somehow still familiar called to him, growing more urgent every moment even through all the chaos, but he could go no further than he had. He could only wait for something, he didn't know _what_, to happen to somehow make things better. Then he had to find her…

Jack opened his eyes on a gasp; he had finally been able to break the meditative state. How had he fallen into Ianto's dreams..? They could be nothing else. The first memory could have been nothing other than Canary Wharf, the third one most likely the same, but earlier in the battle. Ianto had readily admitted the reason why he survived. He'd been locked in the deepest part of the Archives until after the Doctor had stopped the fighting and left. The second dream…it had to be a dream rather than the jumbled memories the others had been. Perhaps parts of his life in London mixed with some of the things he'd experienced in Cardiff since joining Jack's team.

Jack had been curious about Lisa. Well, now he knew what she'd looked like. She was beautiful. Jack had somehow shared the deeply felt emotion when he'd kissed her goodbye. No wonder Ianto still mourned her so deeply.

And no wonder Ianto avoided sleep. No wonder he woke from his dreams so easily. If his nights were spent bouncing between memories of Canary Wharf and mixed up dreams of hunting the streets alone, Jack wouldn't want to sleep either.

He hadn't been shielded, Jack realized. In fact, he hadn't shielded in so many years he barely ever thought of it, anymore. Ianto must be gifted, although Jack doubted he knew it. If it hadn't been in his records, it hadn't been noticed by Torchwood one, so it was probably only latent. Jack had just slipped into his sleeping mind because he was receptive, they were touching, and Jack's projective telepathy had decided to kick him when least expected. Probably the meditation he'd used had opened him more than he'd intended. He'd have to remember not to ever use that particular method when he was sharing his bed.

Trying not to disturb Ianto, because despite the dreams he appeared to be sleeping deeply for once, Jack turned to his side. He paused, waiting, when Ianto took a deep breath and shifted, but the young man didn't wake.

Jack glanced across to see the time, and had to blink and look again when he read 6:46 AM. What felt like minutes, dreams shared or not, had actually been hours. It was probably past time for them both to be up, or they'd be hard-pressed to keep the others from figuring out exactly how they'd spent their night. Or…Jack looked down again at Ianto's sleeping face, then flipped open his wristband. A few buttons pressed, a message typed, and a text went out to the rest of the team telling them to take the morning off. If, all unknowing, he'd been expending mental energy for the past few hours, he could probably even sleep an hour or two himself. And when he woke…maybe a repeat of the night before. He hadn't had lazy morning sex in more years than he could count…

* * *

><p><em>Author's Note: You may have noticed by now that the opening quote from the episode each chapter relates to is a quote from the person whose POV the chapter is mostly written in. I'll tell you a secret, it's a cheat. I'm giving you a clue as to the mindset of the person whose thoughts you'll be reading. A glimpse behind whatever masks they're putting up for the benefit of whoever they might be interacting with in the chapter. This applies ONLY to the regular chapters, not to the Interludes with the Doctor. The POV changes in the first chapter were just to get the characters to a point where Gwen had recovered enough to take over the main POV, and they are not going to be the norm for the rest of the fic.<em>

_As for this chapter, this one is obviously a pure Post-Mort of the episode. Fairly straightforward. If you've read the rambling authors note on the old version of this story, this is what I meant when I said that I hadn't done enough to establish the relationship I was trying to convey in the original first chapter. It's still relatively early on for Jack and Ianto. Things are very casual between them, and yet there are already signs that Jack at least is more invested in things than even he realizes. He also has a very bad habit of either ignoring or dismissing things that he really should pay more attention to._


	4. Chapter 3

_"Of course. It's emotion. Human emotion is energy. You can't always see it, or hear it, but you can feel it. Ever had deja vu? Felt someone walk over your grave? Ever felt someone behind you in an empty room? Well, there was. There always is..."_ - Captain Jack Harkness, Ghost Machine

* * *

><p>Jack found Ianto in the small kitchenette that had rarely been used before he arrived, cleaning dishes that must have piled up over the last few days judging by the number stacked in the drainer. He had his jacket and tie removed, collar open, and his sleeves rolled up as he worked. For Ianto, knowing Jack as he did by now, it was practically an engraved invitation.<p>

"You smell like cordite…" Ianto said, tilting his head to the side as Jack's arms wrapped around his waist. "Did you have fun on the range?"

"Mmhmm..." Jack breathed, running his nose down Ianto's neck, the scent of clean soap and Ianto met his sometimes annoyingly oversensitive nose; the young man had never worn cologne since he'd appeared in Jack's life. No chemicals and overpowering perfumes to cover up his natural scent. "She's almost as much of a natural as you were."

"You teach _respect_ instead of fear." Ianto told him, "You _enjoy_ weapons, so you know how to make it fun instead of frightening. _Distracting_, but fun…"

"If someone can shoot with me looming over them, they can shoot in any situation." Jack smirked.

"Should that be looming, or _leering_..?" Ianto asked, pulling away to turn and raise an eyebrow at him. "Shall I go clear up the equipment, then?"

"Done." Jack grinned proudly. "Cleared up after she left. I even changed the targets."

"I suppose you think you deserve a reward for that…" Ianto looked amused, as he dried his hands on a tea-towel he took from beside the sink, and then set it aside again. "Or is it for not winding up in the same situation we did when you took _me_ down there the first time?"

"What, finding spent casings stuck to odd bits of skin the next morning?" Jack laughed. "I keep telling you, _you're_ the only one who's ever responded quite that powerfully to my training methods, Ianto…"

"Not for lack of trying, I'm sure…" Ianto rolled his eyes.

"We could always go back down there, conduct an experiment…" Jack moved back in to press his body against Ianto, Jack's hands and arms trapping him against the counter. "See if the same circumstances produce the same result…"

"I refuse to let you make another attempt to infect me with your gun fetish." Ianto shook his head, smirking as he ran his hands down the front of Jack's waistcoat to the chain and pulling on it lightly, then lowering his hands to rest on Jack's belt buckle. "Can't afford a hard-on every time you pull out _your_ weapon... Never get _anything_ done, would I?"

"Well, if you don't want to do that we could always…try something new..?"

"Like what?" Ianto looked at Jack suspiciously.

"Like…" Jack's hands shifted from the counter to Ianto's lower back and then further down, pressing them together tightly. "_Me_ inside of _you_, making you feel as out of control and _amazing_ as you always do me…"

"Jack…I've never…" Ianto was wide-eyed, and if he'd had room Jack knew he'd have pulled away entirely, which was exactly why he'd trapped Ianto so effectively in the first place.

"You'd never done the other, either…" If Jack had felt the slightest difference in the interest he could physically feel, he wouldn't push the issue, but on the contrary Ianto had only gotten harder.

"Well, not exactly…just…not with a _man_…"

"Oh…_really_?" Jack's eyebrows rose.

"Girl I knew..._Addy_…" Ianto flushed high across his cheekbones, and Jack found it incredibly attractive that as forceful as Ianto could be in the appropriate circumstances, he could still blush about some things. "She liked to, ah…_experiment_…"

"Kinky ex-girlfriend, _nice_…" Jack grinned at him, and waggled his eyebrows playfully. "She from around here? Maybe we could…"

"_No_, she…" Ianto's eyes closed, and he blew out a heavy breath before he opened them again. "She was from London…worked on the top floor."

"Oh…" Jack released his hold, hands moving to Ianto's shoulders, ready to step back entirely and give the other man his space. He'd never really thought about it in those terms; not just the girlfriend he couldn't bring himself to speak of, but so many others he must have known… "Dammit, Ianto, I'm sor…"

"No, it's alright." Ianto shook his head, and rested a hand on Jack's chest to stop the apology, and the retreat. "It was never serious, just friends in the end. We weren't even exclusive, not like…"

"I'm still sorry, I shouldn't have made light of…" Ianto cut him off again, this time by pressing his lips to Jack's and kissing him deeply.

"Jack, I'm _never_ going to be able to avoid all those landmines indefinitely. It's fine." Ianto assured him, after he pulled back from the kiss. He left his hands at either side of Jack's face, thumbs grazing his cheeks; he met Jack's eyes squarely. "Instead of apologizing…just do something for me..?"

"_Anything_…" Looking into those eyes that sometimes, like now, seemed so much older than they deserved to; Jack absolutely meant it.

"I think in honor of Addy, I could maybe do some experimenting of my own...If you promise you'll make me forget again for just a little while…"

"Trust me?" Jack's brows drew together, and he looked for the slightest bit of doubt in Ianto's eyes as he waited for an answer.

"Yeah." Not an ounce of doubt, and Jack thought maybe they'd finally turned a corner they'd been hesitating at for months.

Jack smiled, dropping his forehead to meet Ianto's, "Then when I'm done with you, you won't even remember your _name_ until I remind you…"

"That'll do for a start…" Ianto smiled back.

* * *

><p><em>Author's Note: So, I'll make an admission right here. THIS chapter is probably my favorite thing I have ever written. I wrote it mostly in one big free-form chunk, and when I finished and read it over I couldn't believe how perfectly I'd managed to capture exactly what I was hoping to when I decided to start my story over. Considering the point at which this scene takes place, in the context of the season not the actual episode, it's almost painful when you consider what's coming. I started out writing a playful scene about how Jack got Ianto to finally let him top, and without me even trying it turned into exactly what I needed to justify the completely out of control emotional depth of their reactions in Cyberwoman. So, yeah. LOVE this chapter. <em>

_Also, you'll note that other than the minuscule bit in the first chapter, you haven't seen anything from Ianto's POV so far. That's deliberate. It would be way too easy to fall into the trap of directly illustrating his feelings and thoughts throughout all of this. He's honestly so much more complicated than Jack is, at this point. I find it much more interesting to take my clues from the subtleties with Ianto Jones. _

_And, bad news: This is as far as I've made it when it comes to posting ready chapters for the rewrite. I may get the Cyberwoman chapter out this weekend, at which point I can take us right back up to where we were before. I just haven't managed to get it in a place i'm happy with, so I can't promise anything._


	5. Interlude 1

**Interlude - Those moments when you wonder if you've been here before.**

"Doctor, where are we?" Rose asked, leaning around him to try and peek outside the door.

"Somewhere we shouldn't be." The Doctor said, pulling away from the door and turning to look curiously at the console.

"Is this someone's house?" Rose asked, her eyes wide. "It looks like a bedroom back home, only...nicer?"

"We're not on Earth, Rose." The Doctor shook his head, still gazing intently at the TARDIS's console, and then sighed. "Despite appearances, we're not even in your proper time. I know where we are. I've even slept in that slightly anachronistic guest room... I just have no idea why we landed here. I was aiming for _Sancleen_..."

"Parking in my guest room again, Doctor..?" A voice called dryly from the open door of the TARDIS, and Rose stepped back a step in surprise at the sudden appearance. "The atmosphere on this planet is perfectly safe, and I did mention that the back patio has a considerable amount of extra space, last time you visited..."

"I blame her." The Doctor sighed, sticking a thumb over his shoulder at the console as an attractive man came into the ship from the room outside. "I think she must have been missing you, since we hadn't visited in a while by our timeline. Not that it isn't nice to see you again, of course."

"It's always good to see you as well, Doctor." The young man smiled, and turned to Rose to continue. "And you're Rose Tyler. It's very nice to finally meet you." With those words, he took her hand and brought it to his lips where he kissed it lightly while gazing at her with sparkling eyes.

Rose blushed pink, and seemingly despite herself she blurted out, "You've heard of me?"

"_You_ are a very special young woman, Rose Tyler." The attractive man said with a small smile. "Of course I've heard of you. I've wanted to meet you for some time. I very much hope that you'll enjoy your visit to my home."

"I suppose we could stay to tea..." The Doctor said, smiling indulgently at Rose's flustered reaction to the attractive but enigmatic man who had all but forced him to recover his equilibrium after the Time War. He knew, or could at least guess that he himself had been the one to tell his friend of Rose at some future point on his timeline.

It made him sad to think about the fact that someone he just knew without needing it confirmed was a future companion of his had never met her. He didn't want to think about how her time with him would come to an end, as it surely would.

As much as his enigmatic friend had started him on the road to recovery, Rose had been the one to complete the job. It made a strange sort of sense for the TARDIS to bring the two together, so when his friend offered his arm politely to Rose and she took it with a badly stifled giggle, the Doctor followed along quite happily.

* * *

><p><em>It seems the last section of this interlude somehow got cut off and this is the first time I noticed it, so I've fixed the small missing bit that was the actual ending of this Doctor Who interlude. Yes this is first season Doctor Who, somewhere roughly between the episodes World War Three and Dalek. Rose has been back home, but they haven't met either Adam or Jack yet.<em>


	6. Chapter 4

_"Look, I've shared cars with women before, I know what'll happen. There'll be an emergency, all rarin' to go, I jump in. What do I find? Seat's in the wrong position, rear-view mirror is out of line, and the steering wheel is in my crotch. Time it takes to sort it all out, aliens'll have taken Newport... " - Owen Harper, Cyberwoman._

* * *

><p>"Where is he?" Jack asked angrily, his nostrils flaring when he looked up to see Owen enter the office alone.<p>

"I sent him home." Owen said, narrowing his eyes. He strode forward quickly when Jack stood seemingly to go out after Ianto. Owen shoved the Captain roughly back into his chair. "Don't you bloody dare! Sit down!"

"Why did you send him home? He needs to be debriefed and I need to…" Jack said angrily, grabbing the arms of his chair as if to jump out of it again.

"You need to calm the fuck down, _Captain_." Owen told him, glaring until Jack finally settled back into his chair properly. Owen took a deep breath, and moved around the desk to take the other chair. "_I_ debriefed him as I was checking him over. He's not got so much as a scratch on him, by the way. I have the girls taking care of the conversion unit, and he showed me where the body of the cybernetics specialist he called in to help him was hidden before I let him go. It's _done_, Jack."

"_I_ need to debrief him!" Jack slammed his fist down on the desk, and the resulting loud bang made them both jump slightly, but Owen didn't allow the residual adrenaline causing that reaction to stop him from making his point.

"No, _you_ need to stay as far as fucking possible _away_ from him. You've done more than enough damage to that poor kid for one bloody night."

"What are you talking..?"

"You were so _lucky_, Harkness…" Owen shook his head. "So bloody lucky, and you have no idea, do you?"

"Of course, we were all just lucky she..."

"No, not the rest of us. _You_ were lucky." Owen cut him off. "If he had followed that unforgivable order you gave him, by the time we made it down there we'd have found them _both_ with bullets in their heads. If that had happened, you'd have been out a doctor and a tech specialist shortly afterward. Hell if I know whether Gwen would have followed us, but the next time Tosh and I walked out of here, you'd have never have seen us again. Does that make an impression, Captain Harkness?"

"She needed to be stopped!"

"Damn _right_ she needed to be stopped, but _he_ didn't need to be the one to do it!" Owen said, leaning forward he slapped the flat of his hand on the desk emphatically. "He shouldn't have even had to _watch_. You should have locked him down in a cell and taken the rest of us to finish her off so he didn't have to see it happen in front of him. You were so far out of control you wouldn't even listen to us trying to tell you that you were crossing a line with _us_ as much as with Ianto. You were being exactly the monster he accused you of, and I signed up to fight monsters not work for one. I mean, after tonight, I suppose I can only give thanks that you knocked me out and didn't make me watch when you ripped Katie's brain out of her head, yeah?"

Jack blanched and sat silently, and Owen could see that he'd finally begun to reach the Captain.

"He _loved_ her." Owen said, sternly. "Sure, he was blinded by it in the end, but I'll be damned if I let you forget that now it's over. He's not some collaborator who wanted to bring Cybermen back into the world. His only motivation for everything he did from the moment he found her in London was that he loved her more than his own life, and was willing to risk that life just on the remotest chance it was possible to save her. The worst part of it is I knew there was something wrong with him. His reactions were all wrong for simple PTSD. Oh, some of them were textbook, the dislike of physical contact, and the way he preferred not to draw attention to himself…but as time went on he seemed to get better so I second guessed myself. I let myself think that since he'd been so far out of the actual battle down in the Archives, he hadn't been as deeply affected as I would have expected. If I'd followed up, done my job as the only person around here remotely qualified to counsel the rest of you I might have gotten him to open up and tell me the truth, and one way or another all this death and misery could have been avoided. That's all on me."

"Not all of it." Jack finally spoke, and the last of his anger seemed to have drained away slowly as Owen had gone on. "I could have talked to him more… Asked him questions… He talked to me more than the rest of you, spent more time with me. I don't think the rest of you realize to what degree I actually trusted him. It wasn't like he said. I knew she'd existed, but he told me she was dead, and wouldn't speak of her again. It wasn't that I didn't want to know, I was just trying to respect his grief and wait for him to be ready…"

"Probably deliberate…" Owen shrugged, "We've all noticed how well he could read you. Sometimes he seemed like the only one who ever had the slightest chance of making any sense of some of the things you've done, or talking you down when you get into a snit. He had your number, and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, from day one. If he guessed that you'd respect his grief, implying that it kept him from talking about her meant he had one less lie he had to tell you. I think part of his issues with not wanting to get too close to any of us were because he didn't like having to lie to us. That bit before she tossed him around and we all scattered, when he was beggin' you for a chance to try to talk her down, he even said he wanted to save all of us. He _meant_ it; he wasn't in any shape for calculated deception at that point. It's not that he doesn't care about the rest of us, it's just that his entire existence had been focused on saving her for so long that he wasn't able to let go and admit he'd failed. He was locked down in the basements the entire Battle; on top of everything else he probably felt misplaced guilt because he wasn't there to at least try to keep her from being taken in the first place. Between the trauma, and that degree of guilt over someone he obviously loved so much, I can't imagine many people who wouldn't have done exactly as he did, and been just as difficult to convince that it was too late. Myself included. If it'd been Katie… I'd have done anything for even the remotest chance."

"You sound like you want me to forgive this, and bring him back…"

"Fuck no, I don't." Owen sighed. "What I _want_ is to see him Retconned to back before he ever heard of Torchwood, and sent off to work in some quaint little library on the north coast of Wales. Someplace he'd never have to see the kind of trauma he's spent the last six months dealing with again. I just know that in his case that's impossible, and the only thing really left for him would be to bring him back here and let him do something meaningful to try and make up for not being able to save her. He's not suicidal right now, or I wouldn't have sent him home alone. He's not the type to give up on much, even after a colossal failure like this, and right now he's still too angry to blame himself enough for suicide to be an option. I know bloody damn well you aren't going to kill him, and he's got the highest immunity to Retcon I've ever come across. Honestly, I doubt we even have enough in stock to accomplish it. Prob'ly kill him if we tried because the sedative works, it's just your amnesia drug component he seems to shrug off like it's not even there. After the first dose failed, I tested him on different batches just to be absolutely sure, but I knew that none of them had been tampered with or lost potency, much less all of them. We can't make him forget three minutes, much less three years of time."

"I've been sitting here considering your first idea…" Jack shook his head, and eyed Owen skeptically. "I knew you said in your original report that he was immune, but I assumed you meant in the same way Gwen is resistant. The stubborn sort that can take any trigger and use it to break the amnesia, but getting them away from anything that might do it takes care of the problem. You're saying he really is immune?"

"Absolutely, entirely,_ completely_ immune." Owen said, disgustedly. "I don't know why, I can't even make an educated guess. I've examined his blood, neural chemistry, chemical tolerances, and DNA and there's nothing in any of them to explain it. Maybe now this has all come out he'll open up, and there'll be some clue, but until he does I can't give you an explanation, just a result. There's no chance of sending him off that way, and there's no other tenable option, so he'll have to come back."

"I could just let him go…"

"Jack, what do you think would have happened to me if you'd 'just let me go' after Katie? No Retcon, no visit to the cemetery with a job offer to give me something to live for when my entire world had imploded in that surgery?" Owen asked, seriously. "How long do you think it would have been before I turned to drink and drugs, or took the fast route and put a bullet in my head?"

"OK, I see your point…" Jack sighed.

"Do you really, Jack? Takes a special sort of person to do this job right, and you used to realize that." Owen told him. "After what happened with Susie, you brought Gwen in here, and you think she's different, and that's made you think that you were wrong when you recruited us, but you weren't. I know for a fact you picked Tosh and me in particular because you saw that we had that special something that makes this job not just a job but a calling. We were born to do this, but it was never going to come out of us until something happened to bring it out. What you need to decide is if you see that same thing in Ianto that you did in us. Stop looking at Gwen as your example of what Torchwood should become, and realize that she's the one who's most likely to break under the kind of pressure we deal with, because she's never even imagined the weight of it."

"Gwen brings something important to this team…"

"Yeah, a nice set of tits, and wide pleading eyes." Owen scoffed. "She's a bleeding heart, and that heart is going to get broken by this place before too long. What she becomes after that happens is the important thing."

"She sees things in a way the rest of us don't." Jack argued. "An outside perspective."

"Maybe so, but she's not on the outside anymore." Owen shrugged. "Whatever she is now, sooner or later she's going to see something that fundamentally changes her, and we're going to have to put the pieces of her back together. What she becomes when that happens is what will define her role on the team, but that's a problem for the future. The one you need to worry about now is the Teaboy…"

"His name is _Ianto_." Jack's eyes narrowed.

"Damn right it is, and when he tells me off for calling him that, I'll know he's gotten past this." Owen said, with a negligent shrug. "You handle him in your patented way, and I'll handle him in mine."

"He deserves a little more respect than that, Owen…"

"Not until he demands it, he doesn't." The doctor replied, "He let you shag him to get a job here, that makes him one thing in my mind, and until he proves differently I'll call him whatever I like. I may understand why he did what he did, but that doesn't mean I respect his methods."

"He didn't let me _shag him_ to get his job." Jack's mouth dropped open in shock. "What the hell makes you think that?"

"Do you deny you shagged him?"

"No, but…"

"Is he even attracted to men at all on that level, Jack?" Owen shook his head in disgust, and glared. "He was in love with her, he needed to get in here to save her, and he decided shagging you was the fastest way to make it happen."

"Yes he is, it's not something a man can exactly fake, and no he absolutely did not." Jack insisted. "He had the kind of interest, at least in me, that can't be faked, but he didn't try pursue it beyond the same sort of mild flirtation I do with everyone. In fact he deliberately pulled away from what would have been a perfect opportunity had he been inclined to try what you're accusing him of, despite the fact that it was blatantly obvious to both of us that I would have reciprocated. After what I saw of him that night catching Myfanwy, any physical attraction I had for him was entirely beside the point. You weren't there, and maybe your misunderstanding and any part it might have played in the rest of you having trouble accepting him is my fault for never explaining this when I brought him in, but I've never felt the need to explain my recruitment process with anyone since I took over here. That night he showed natural leadership qualities, intelligence, compassion, and good instincts for the sort of work we do despite his lack of formal field training. I didn't put him through firearms training just to follow the regs, only to have him putter around the base as our dogsbody forever. For one thing it would have been a massive waste of potential, and Cardiff has never had the luxury of retaining someone who couldn't fit into the field team on anything but a temporary basis. We need special people. but we're too small for _specialists_. That's why I originally rejected him, not just because he was from London, but because his records said he was basically a low-level clerk after just over two years with them. My assumption being that if he had the ability to be a field agent they would have encouraged it, and since they didn't he had no place here where we've always been too small to function without all the members being able to at least occasionally take their place there. I've had every intention of eventually bringing him into the field when I thought he'd recovered enough from his own trauma. I wanted to give him at least a year before I began easing him into the field and only that long out of deference to what he'd been through. Contrary to popular belief, I don't think with my dick when it comes to Torchwood. I was attracted to him the first time we met, and I still originally turned him down for the job when he came to ask. He proved he had far more to offer to Torchwood than the sum of his CV that night, and I changed my original decision based on that. Not that it's any of your business under normal circumstances; yes we were eventually having sex, but I'm the one who seduced him, and I didn't do it until after I hired him. He was already in, and I made it clear I would have taken no for an answer with no effect on his job. He… I can't exactly say he wasn't using me...it just wasn't in order to get his place here. It was to forget what he'd been through, and I guess what he was still going through, even just for a little while. Neither of us ever really pretended it was anything more than that. I can't say it doesn't sting a bit, but I can at least understand it. There are all sorts of reasons to have sex with someone other than the person you're in love with. Mutual comfort and distraction from emotional pain certainly aren't the worst of them."

"No, they aren't." Owen nodded in agreement and smirked slightly, pleased that he had gotten the Captain to the point where he too could acknowledge it. Psychology wasn't his forte, for all he'd done his rotation with all the other residents. "And I'm glad you can see it that way, because it didn't seem like it when you had a gun to his head."

"That was…"

"Betrayal." Owen finished for him. "You felt betrayed. Then again, so did he. I don't think I'd have been able to restrain myself to a single, albeit spectacular punch after what you'd just made him watch. The thing is Jack; you both have reasons to hate each other now, and that's a big problem for the team that might not be there if you hadn't been sleeping together. The question is will you both be able to get past it to work together?"

"I can forgive him." Jack said, but his voice grew softer as he continued. "I said I understand. He was deluded, he was desperate, and he was in pain. I get that. I can't condone what he did because he was wrong…"

"But was he?" Owen asked. "How do you know he was really wrong?"

"I know about the Cybermen…"

"You can't _possibly_ know as much as he does." Owen shook his head. "You don't even know as much as I do. I was there for the aftermath, and you didn't rush out until after most of the tower was cleared and we discovered that the Archives had been saved. Most likely by him, I might add. He was there for the entire thing, and he obviously saw a lot more of things than we realized. He'd have had to in order to get her out as he did. That's something you should probably look into, preferably before you go and see him. Because I know you're going to go see him as soon as I'll let you. There are big discrepancies now that you need to figure out first. There were other survivors. How did they get out? Answer that, and you might find a clue in there about his experiences."

"Why does it matter, now?" Jack shook his head, "We know what happened that day…"

"No we don't, or we'd have known about _this; h_ad some clue that it was possible. How did he get her out? How did he even find her in the first place? The conversion tables were on the upper floors, and he claims he was stuck in the lowest underground levels. How did he make it through to get her? The building was on fire and already falling down around them all from structural damage. I think the details are more important than you realize."

"What do you know?" Jack tilted his head and looked closely at him.

"Nothing concrete," Owen shrugged, and made a face. "I helped treat some of the survivors, while Susie was arguing with the UNIT commander about who had rights to the salvage. I _didn't_ treat Ianto, but I do remember several of the people I _did_ treat spoke of another employee who was the one who got most of them out in the first place. Jack, until he showed up here I thought I met every survivor that day in the medical tent they'd set up and there wasn't anyone I saw who survived with no injuries. There was a girl buried under a wall, her pelvis was crushed, but she made it out because someone dug her out from under that wall and got her stabilized. She was brought out by a group of other survivors who said that someone else had helped them get out, and then gave her over to them to bring down the service stairs while he went to search for more trapped people on the upper floors. None of the people I saw that day would have been physically capable of saving that girl, but I accepted their story at face value. I assumed the man they met was must have either been trapped further upstairs and died, or eventually treated by one of the UNIT doctors after my attention was drawn away, and then I forgot about it. Until now. I never saw him at all that day; I can only assume that was by his choice. He was hiding from us, because he found Lisa, but along the way he helped everyone he could. He wasn't blindly ignoring everything around him as you'd expect from someone who's focus was saving the woman he loved. Everything going on around him, all that chaos, a massacre on a level completely outside the experience of anyone who hasn't been on what amounts to a contained battle-field, and he still stopped to help every person he could along the way even when it delayed him from his main purpose… Looking back on it I know that no one else who came out of that building was capable of saving that girl, much less dragging Lisa out. So, the question is, how did we not know about him? They were looking for anything they could find to try and salvage the disaster. Any good publicity would have been jumped on in a heartbeat. They had a young man, attractive, well-spoken, and seemingly undamaged mentally or physically… So why is it that they didn't have him parading in front of cameras being rewarded for his heroism? They could have made it fit the cover story, and been able to do some public relations damage control. So why didn't they? If that had happened, he never would have been able to come here. His name is on the list of survivors. He had to have spoken with someone in authority afterward for that to happen. He didn't fall through the cracks the way he apparently made sure Lisa did, and presumably the others would have been able to identify him as their rescuer. So, why didn't it happen?"

"He was a junior researcher; maybe he just wasn't important enough to…"

"He could have been a bloody _janitor_ cleaning Hartman's_ toilet_ when the battle started, and it wouldn't have mattered if I'm right and he's the one who got all those people out." Owen scoffed. "He's certainly not my type, but I defy you to say he wouldn't have been a perfect face to have on the telly to give the public someone to connect with. Keeping in mind that they didn't know he was trying to smuggle his half-converted girlfriend out of London. He'd have hated every second of being made into a hero, but I sincerely doubt that the people in charge would have taken that into account under normal conditions."

"You're right…" Jack admitted. "He'd have played perfectly and I can't imagine why it didn't happen that way. It would actually have been good for them to be able to distract attention from the reality and add to the cover story with a heroic tale, if he'd been willing to play along. Maybe that's how he got out of it. By insisting that he wouldn't play along."

"Maybe." Owen agreed, "Or maybe he told them that he didn't want to break his cover because he wanted to come here, and continue working for Torchwood, and they had some reason to think that he would be a bigger asset here than parading heroically on the telly. That's the only reason I can think of that would have allowed him to avoid it."

"If that were the case, he wouldn't have had to convince me to hire him. He could have had me ordered to take him as a transfer."

"You broke off all ties, and there was no one left to order…"

"That's not true." Jack shook his head. "I only broke off ties with Torchwood London. The original charter names the individual branches autonomous. It never required any branch to answer to a central one, it only ever required they to answer to the monarchy. When I decided to make the break from London, all I had to do was point that out to the Queen. I justified it with the actual fact that London's main focus has always been research while ours is purely defensive. We need different things in our people, so we recruit accordingly and their attempts to subvert my authority were a hindrance as I tried to assemble an appropriate team. She approved my right to run the base autonomously based on that point, and that allowed me to make broader changes to the way things were done here than I'd have been able to otherwise. Once_ she_ put her stamp of approval on me, it meant I answered to no authority other than her or her personally designated representative. So, we're beyond the government but not actually beyond all authority. The Torchwood Charter would still allow the Queen to force me to hire someone, if she felt the need to do so. If he used wanting to come here to work as an excuse, I can't see why they didn't make it an official transfer order, instead of letting him come down here on his own to convince me."

"Unless he asked them not to, and had enough banked credit with the Crown as the unsung hero of the day to get what he wanted." Owen shrugged. "If I were him, I wouldn't have wanted to be forced on us, either. Considering the well-known bad blood between the two branches after you broke away, and especially after Hartman took over, he would have known that it would make us even more distrustful of him had he been forced on us. Given his underlying motivation for coming here, that would have made things a lot more difficult than if he could convince you entirely on his own to trust him enough to let him in. Which he obviously had reason to think he could."

"Good point." Jack mused. "The question is, how did he get away with it? Could he have had that much credit with the Crown to be allowed to go his own way? People don't generally get to make their own choices once they've joined Torchwood. Even without my Retcon, T1 had their own ways of enforcing their authority on their people…"

"Jack, there was nobody left with any authority." Owen reminded him. "Trust me there was no one capable of handling it, mentally or physically, except possibly him, and like you said he was only a junior researcher…"

"Not to mention the Queen ordered a shut-down, and revoked London's charter because they screwed up so badly…" Jack added.

"I recommend that before you go speak to him, you find out what happened to the rest of the survivors, and figure out what made him so different that he wound up here the way he did." Owen said. "In the mean-time, I'm going to see what I can figure out from the bodies, while Tosh looks into finding out exactly what Ianto and that cybernetics guy were trying to do with Lisa…"

"No." Jack sat up from the slouch he'd taken as they spoke. "No, destroy everything. There is no reason to…"

"There is every reason, Jack." Owen shook his head. "I won't let you brush it under the rug. We need to know if he was right."

"He wasn't."

"I've told you already, you _can't_ know that for sure." Owen argued. "None of us can, including him, until we're able to determine exactly how far the conversion had gone with her. There is no danger in this. The conversion table is being dismantled, and the parts melted down. The girls are probably nearly finished with it, and I will personally make sure that no information about how it was made is recorded if I have to wipe Tosh's memory myself. This isn't like Susie with the glove, Jack. We all know exactly how dangerous this shite is, but we do need to understand what happened with Lisa. She was different. He couldn't have kept her alive and under control as long as he did, if she weren't. We need to understand how and why she was different. It might help in the future if there is ever a way for those things ever come back. What we find out might allow us to save lives, if that ever happened."

Jack looked obstinate for a moment, but then something seemed to occur to him and he became thoughtful, then he nodded and his expression cleared as if he had wiped it away. He seemed to collect himself before he answered with another nod, "It might also give him some closure to know for sure that he was wrong…"

"You keep saying that, and I keep telling you that I'm not sure he was entirely wrong." Owen said, shaking his head. "But the only way I'm going to be able to prove it to you, is if you let me go ahead and examine her. One of you is right, and I have a feeling that knowing which one is going to be the difference, here."

"Alright, fine." Jack huffed. "On the condition that the implants are removed from her body and destroyed, the table is destroyed in its entirety, and any information Tosh is able to pull from whatever computers were involved is wiped at the end of the investigation. Nothing will be saved, except the anecdotal evidence and the results of the analysis. Nothing that would allow anyone to recreate what was done, only the findings. Understood?"

"That's all I wanted." Owen agreed easily. "I have no more wish for anyone to be able to recreate what happened than you do, I just want to understand how it did so we're prepared if it ever happens again. What do you want me to do with her body, once all the implants have been removed? I can tell you now, there won't be much left by the look of things…"

"Cremation." Jack told him, with a sigh. "For what it's worth, I can at least allow him to inter her here afterwards. I think it's safe to assume that he would have done something on the order of a funeral before coming here in order to throw off the scent. He's certainly smart enough not to have left that loose end. I don't even know if she had any family…"

"I looked her up before I came up here.' Owen shook his head. "He was her next of kin in Torchwood's records. Her parents passed in a car accident when she was still at Uni. He may not have even needed to bother. After probably losing all their friends that day, no one but him would have missed her. That probably only made things worse for him…"

"Well, then at least we can give him that much." Jack sighed. "If you're able to remove everything, and the body is cremated I may even bend the rules and let him bury her remains. That would give him a physical place to go to mourn, at the very least. It might make all the difference."

"I still go up to London once a year on Katie's birthday…"

"I know." Jack told him, and Owen could tell that the Captain wasn't going to make him say anymore about it. "So, you agree that's the best option?"

"Yeah." Owen nodded, with his eyes closed. Then took a deep breath and opened them again, "I'll take care of it as soon as my exam is complete. Try to make it quick, so he doesn't have to wait too long."

"Owen…" Jack seemed to be searching for the right words, for once. "You gonna be ok with all this? I know it…"

"It hits close to home." Owen acknowledged. "Probably why I can't bring myself to be angry that he nearly got us all killed. At least with Katie it was over quickly, before I even really knew what was going on. The misdiagnosis of early Alzheimer's was bad enough as it was, I can't even imagine knowing that the woman I loved was dying slowly as an alien took over her mind bit by bit… I could never have managed to do what he did. I wouldn't have had the strength."

"You had the strength to get through it." Jack told him. "You had the strength to come here and make a difference. Never forget that, Owen."

"Well, if you want to salvage Teaboy the same way you did me, then you're going to need to find something that will let him do the same thing. As bad as I was, it's no patch at all on what he's dealing with. It's not just losing her. He lost everything in London, and what little bit of bond he might feel toward our team is going to be bloody hard to maintain after watching us kill her. If you want to keep him, you need to find something that only he can do, and you need to do it fast. Not the archives, it wont be enough. I think you know better than any of us do what he might really be capable of…"

"I have a few ideas." Jack inclined his head, and Owen got the idea that even through their conversation Jack had been considering options for what to do with Ianto, since they really didn't have much choice but to keep him, somehow.

He'd realized a long time ago that Jack was smarter and more able to multi-task than he seemed. The man was on Tosh's level of brilliance, for all he pretended not to be. Now that he'd gotten the Captain thinking again, Owen knew their leader's own curiosity would take care of the rest.

"Alright then, I'll leave it with you and get back to work." Owen told him, simply.

"Tell Gwen she can head home when she and Tosh are finished, if she wants. There's not much more she'd be able to help the two of you with, unless she's feeling up to clearing out some more of the mess while you and Tosh start analyzing what's left."

"I think I can convince her to make a start." Owen rolled his eyes, "I'll just put it to her that if he comes back, Ianto doesn't deserve to have to clean up this particular mess. That bleeding heart of hers will fall all over it's self to volunteer the rest of her."

"You really don't think much of her, do you?" Jack snorted.

"I think she's gorgeous and I'd shag her in a heartbeat, but right now she'd get too attached and I'm not inclined to have another working relationship turn to shite after Susie. I told you what I think of her as an operative, already." Owen replied, standing and continuing as he made his way to the door. "No point in rehashing it until she's had that life-changing moment that will decide things one way or another. Go do whatever it is you do when you need to get all the shite we deal with out of your system, Captain. We can hold down the fort for now, and you still look like you need it."

"I would, but you told me to stay away from him, and I doubt he's inclined to help at the moment..." Jack's voice suddenly sounded almost strangled, as if the words had forced themselves out despite his wishes. Owen turned in the doorway to glance back and was surprised at the degree of emotion he found when the Captain met his eyes before continuing only slightly more easily. "I agree completely that he's got a right to the anger and betrayal, Owen. I realize you're identifying with him strongly, but in this case he's not the only one with a right to feel that way and it's not proving as easy as you probably expected of me to set it aside, for all I appreciate your attempt to help. Don't worry, I will deal with it before I approach him. I have absolutely no interest in making things worse for him than I already have. So, I'll find another way to manage from here out, and then I'll do whatever it takes to help him do the same."

Owen stared, discomfited and confused enough by the blunt emotional honesty from a man he knew usually hid everything behind a mask at least as developed as the one he himself used, that all he could do was nod once before stepping out of the office and closing the door behind him.

As he made his way down the stairs toward the autopsy bay he realized that for only the second time in the years he'd known Captain Jack Harkness, he'd just seen beneath the mask the man practically lived behind. He hadn't seen that much naked emotion from their leader since the day the man had found him in the cemetery and accepted Owen's abuse without raising hand to defend himself, and then cried along with him when that acceptance allowed the grief to finally overcame his anger enough to do so.

If he was honest with himself, he could admit he'd tried very hard to forget that man existed underneath the mask he saw every day since, but it hadn't stopped him from going to Jack when he needed support he couldn't find at the bottom of a lager or in some random bird's bed.

Based on what Jack had just all but admitted to, he wondered how often since his arrival it had been Ianto who had been the one Jack turned to the way the rest of them always seemed to turn to Jack, and how much finally having someone of his own who understood might have affected him. If it were even half as often as he could imagine given some of the things they'd been through recently, he thought maybe the Captain had a very good point about Ianto not being the only one with a right to feel betrayed.

* * *

><p><em>For the record, the confusingly placed conversation between Jack and Gwen in the aftermath of what happened during the episode didn't occur in this universe. I realize that scene was meant to show that Ianto was staying on at Torchwood (because of course the original script had him dying), but it throws off the timetable of the show and negates some of the emotional impact of what's happened. I've always thought the ep should have ended with the final scene in the basements or a scene that better showed why Jack let Ianto stay with the team rather than one that doesn't do much more than highlight the fact that Gwen has a hopeless crush on Jack but doesn't really understand him very well and he uses that to mislead her regularly. So, this scene with Owen replaces that unfortunate scene and does what the other didn't accomplish. The Cyberwoman aftermath chapters (Yes, chapters plural. There will be a few more before we move on to the Small Worlds chapter we had before that deal with things that took place offscreen both in canon on the show, and in my own AU.) are going to be necessarily longer and a bit more complicated than the previous ones. It's sort of a major turning point that I glossed over in the originally published chapters of the story, always intending to go back and fill it in. I do promise that from now on I'll be posting slightly more often than once every six months or so. Once I've gotten past this section of the story, it will be a lot easier to progress (Especially since a certain character jumped up and decided they wanted to be worked into the story sooner than I intended and I've finally managed to figure out how by shoehorning in a chapter coming up that isn't on the original outline.), and I have my internet back at home and a new laptop with no keyboard difficulties to slow me down.<em>


	7. Chapter 5

_"When I want you to think for yourself, I'll tell you!" - Jack Harkness, Cyberwoman_

* * *

><p>"Jack?" Toshiko peeked around the edge of the door, obviously attempting to gauge his mood, and Jack inclined his head to her with what he knew was one of his more unreadable looks. He simply didn't have the wherewithal to reassure her at the moment.<p>

"Come in, Tosh." He said, when she continued to hesitate.

"I'm ready with my report." Tosh said, finally entering the office. She dragged the wheeled chair Owen had used the night before out of the corner, and crossed to the desk to take a seat. Jack watched her, attempting to gauge her mood almost as much as she was his. She was upset, he was absolutely certain of it. As long as she'd been part of his team, from the moment he had unearthed her from the cell UNIT had buried her in, he didn't think she'd ever been this upset with him. He thought about Owen's words the night before, the shock of hearing that she and Owen would have walked had his unforgivable behavior cost Ianto his sanity... He felt his face tighten with disgust at himself, and it took every ounce of self-control to keep from showing it further.

Tosh seated herself primly, not willing to meet his eyes, another indication of her inner feelings. She shuffled the loose sheets of her report in her lap and began her report without looking up from them.

"I've examined, dismantled, and now completely destroyed the actual conversion table. All of the additional equipment added to it was medical. Some came from our stores, but most of it was top of the line life-support and diagnostic equipment that Ianto must have purchased himself before he ever came back to Cardiff. Most of the equipment necessary for actual conversion had been removed and replaced by the medical equipment. Some of them are duplicates of items we already have, but there were several pieces Owen would be very pleased to get his hands on, and he says they'll probably make treatment of the team in certain medical emergencies a great deal safer. I recommend that because all of the additional equipment was only patched into the base equipment and not fully integrated it's safe enough to retain. I've been over the software for everything we want to keep, and I'm absolutely sure it's safe to do so." Tosh recited, and then took a deep breath in seeming preparation for his reaction before continuing. "Jack...despite appearances that table wasn't really a conversion table, anymore..."

"So Owen tells me. You're our tech expert, Tosh. If you believe the medical equipment wasn't tainted by being hooked up to the table, I approve your recommendation. With proper storage and maintenance, even the duplicates can be used to back-up their counterparts." Jack nodded, showing no real expression at his pronouncement. "What else did you discover?"

"That Ianto's girlfriend must have been a very gifted mechanical engineer." He noticed her eyes narrow when he couldn't control the slight twitch that pronouncement and what it said about her personal feelings on the matter caused, as she continued tightly. "Ianto is... well, I think he has more basic knowledge of mechanical engineering than I originally assumed, but I still don't believe he has the background to have done what he did without guidance. She had to have helped him during both the planning and implementation stages, despite her condition."

"I understand." Jack gave a short nod of acceptance, but he could tell that her current temper was still not inclined to stand for the deliberate non-reactions he was using to try and force himself to control his emotions.

Considering the fraught conversation he'd already had with Owen the night before, and how deftly the doctor had steered Gwen away from confronting him since then, he hadn't expected Owen to leave Tosh feeling so misused without any discussion, but he obviously had. Jack just didn't feel stable enough in his own responses right now, to manage blunting her justifiable anger with his usual charm, and he wasn't quite ready to confront his bruised feelings again, so he tried to do his best to ignore them and concentrate.

"More to the point, I think I can actually tell you exactly how the situation went so far out of control so quickly..." She elaborated.

"Really?" Jack's eyebrows went up, as he sat forward, and he immediately sensed that she was gratified enough by his sudden interest to stop drawing things out so much to force a reaction from him.

"Yes." She nodded, and glanced down at the papers in her lap again, probably more to continue avoiding Jack's eyes than to remind herself of what was on them. "I found the computer and other equipment the specialist, Tanizaki, brought with him. His notes were in Japanese, but they were intact, so I was able to determine exactly what he was attempting to do, and I believe I understand where the process went wrong. He wasn't yet working with the physical aspects of her conversion, he was making an attempt to stabilize her autonomic functions. He wanted to get her off the life-support table so that he could work with her independent of it. From his notes he assumed that would make it easier to begin removing the implants that were unnecessary to her survival. He intended to go one step at a time. Remove everything that was unnecessary to her survival first, then one by one restoring natural function in the enhanced areas that were."

"Sounds reasonable, so what went wrong?" Jack asked.

"If what I'm understanding is correct, the original download of controlling code for all the implants and physical enhancement was never completed." She said bluntly. "There were pieces of code missing and garbled code in some of the areas that _had_ been completed. That's what originally caused her to be restricted in actual bodily function. I can only assume it's a result of a faulty download due to her conversion being stopped suddenly. Electrical shorts or outages during a software download can cause corruption of even perfectly ordinary programs, and something as complex as this... Well, it's not really surprising given the circumstances as we understand them, now."

"That still sounds very reasonable, Tosh." Jack sighed, "But you're dancing around telling me exactly where you think Tanizaki went wrong."

"Well, the man really was one of the foremost cyberneticists in the world, but even geniuses can make mistakes, and he made a critical one." Tosh returned his sigh, with one of her own. "Rather than repairing or rewriting the code that was already there, which would have allowed the purely physical aspects already in place to function as intended, Tanizaki took a shortcut. He basically did what amounts to a reboot of the system. To give the man the benefit of the doubt, he may have misunderstood how deeply the programming was intended to go, but for whatever reason Tanizaki deliberately caused the systems that create the actual changes to turn a thinking, feeling person into a Cyberman to function the way they were supposed to in the beginning. I can see where he might have thought that rebooting the systems that controlled the autonomic functions of the body would be the fastest method of getting her physically stable. In the abstract it makes sense. He just didn't take into account the fact that those autonomic functions are normally controlled by a person's _brain_, and in fully activating them he allowed them further _access_ to it.

"So, in effect you're saying that he turned her from a partially converted human, into a fully converted Cyberman just by rebooting her systems?"

"In short, yes." Tosh nodded. "Owen and I completely agree on this. I had to go to him with what amounted to a translation of what the code I found was intended to do, and he explained the medical portions to me. Between the two of us were able to determine why she was in the original non-functioning condition, what the reboot did in particular to change that condition, and how it apparently went further than Tanizaki intended. His notes made no mention of any belief that rebooting the system could have anything other than what seemed to him to be the obvious result of restoring the implants to their basic functions. Like many geniuses he seemed to have blinders on when it came to areas outside his specialty. He neglected to consult a medical professional before making his conclusions, or things might have been different."

"In other words he didn't account for the human aspect, only her cybernetic function." Jack said, and he could tell from her expression that he'd surprised her with his quick understanding.

"Exactly." She agreed, and then shrugged as she continued. "For the record...we more than likely would have been able to save her, to a certain degree, at any point up to the exact moment those systems went fully online again. I can't speak to exactly what would have been done to her body by the removal of the implants, Owen has his own beliefs about exactly how much we would have been able to do for her, but with his support I believe I could have at least stabilized her without fully activating what I'm going to call the cyber-code as Tanizaki did. Especially with more time than he had to prepare and write the necessary replacement code than the secrecy Ianto was operating under allowed for. Owen's doubts are more in the area of what her expectations could have been for a normal life after the removal of some of the implants, not in the area of the danger of a potential resumption of cyber-activity. He believes we would have had to leave some of the implants that controlled her internal organs in place to allow her to survive, but with completely new code to control them that would have made them no more dangerous than an artificial heart, for example. In his opinion, the problems came from the implants in her spinal column and brain, some of which allowed for movement in place of connections that were severed to…install them. They were too dangerous to leave in place because of their direct access to her brain. Removing them would have paralyzed her beyond our current ability to heal, but not removing them would have left open the possibility of an _accidental_ reboot of their coding somehow beginning the mental part of the process that creates a Cyberman all over again. Once she was stable with a degree of leisure to consider the options, the choice of whether the life-expectancy she would have in the end was worth the pain and eventual result of continuing the procedures would have had to be hers."

"Damn..." Jack sighed deeply. "I was really hoping you would be able to tell me that Ianto was completely wrong..."

"Well, sorry to disappoint you." Tosh said, with a glare. "He _wasn't_. At least not when he came here of all places he could have potentially looked to for help. I doubt he would have found the exact combination of skills and basic understanding of the situation required to attempt it anywhere else. You'll just have to accept that had we made any effort to bring him into this team as a fully accepted member, someone we cared enough about to make the effort it would have required to get him to trust us with what he was trying to do, we might have been able to prevent this. At least we all bear that responsibility, not just you. Owen and I know that, and I think even Gwen feels that way despite not being here from the beginning."

"That isn't actually the reason I would have preferred him to be wrong about the potential to save her." Jack shook his head. "I don't believe he should be told what you and Owen have worked out about her chances. It only has the potential to make his grief deeper at this point, and he doesn't need that. He had at least as many chances to come to me with the truth as we all missed noticing something was wrong. The fault isn't only on our side."

"Given the reaction he received when he finally did come clean, can you really blame him?" She scoffed.

"Are you going to lecture me about how out of line I was with him, too?" Jack huffed, but looked up and met her eyes before he continued. "I _know_, Tosh. I should never have asked him to do what I did. I don't even know why I did it..."

"I can tell you why. You were out of control. You have a temper, and for whatever reason, you lost it in truly spectacular fashion." Tosh said, and her lips compressed into a tight line. "So, what are you going to do, now?"

"What?"

"Ianto." Tosh elaborated. "What are you going to do to _Ianto_."

"There's only one thing I can do..." Jack said with an unhappy sigh.

"Jack, you can't_ kill_ him..."

"What the hell do you take me for, Tosh?" Jack was horrified, if there were one person on the team he never would have expected to believe that, it was Tosh. Not after what he'd done for her. "Of course I'm not going to _kill_ him. _Christ_... Owen says he's immune to Retcon. Literally _immune_. Were it an option, it's the one I'd probably choose if only to free him of Torchwood entirely. I'd settle him somewhere far away from Cardiff _or_ London, where he'd be able to have a normal life and forget everything he's been through. Killing him isn't an option. Not now that I've gotten past the pure fear of an invasion that must have made me go nuts that night..."

"As much of a relief as that is, it still doesn't answer my question." Tosh said, her relief was patently obvious and Jack was still mildly offended by that as she went on. "If execution and Retcon are both off the table, then what _are_ you going to do?"

"If any of the others asked me that I'd tell them to mind their own damn business..." Jack glared at her slightly, then shook his head not letting himself fall into the anger trap again. "Since I can't Retcon him, I only have two options left. I'm going to offer him full retirement, or a one month suspension and returning here to the team when it's over. Hopefully the second option will give him time to come to terms with everything. It's more a month of bereavement leave than a suspension, really. I wont force him to come back here, even if I agree with Owen that at this point it's in his best interests, given the options available. Letting him go off on his own with the memories of what he's been through, knowing what else is out there... It would be difficult for anyone not to eventually go off the rails. I'll do everything in my power to persuade him of that, but if he insists he can't come back to work with us after this, I'll let him retire without prejudice. I've learned he was given that option after the battle, so I'm certain I can make a case for it again without having to go into too many specific details."

"He was given the option to retire?" Tosh asked, surprised. "I thought that wasn't an option for anyone with Torchwood?"

"It's always been an option in certain cases." Jack explained. "But generally the issue doesn't come up. London's field agents had an even higher attrition rate than ours, and their non-field personnel tended not to _want_ to leave. For all I hated her imperialistic notions and the way she ran her branch as a whole, I have to admit Hartman actually had very modern views in the treatment of her own people. She wasn't the Director who instituted the idea of non-prejudicial retirement and trusting in the oaths every employee took to keep them quiet, but she _was_ the one who most often exercised the privilege of allowing it in return for loyal service to the Crown. Here in Cardiff, our smaller team also tends to stay with Torchwood for life, however long that happens to be. You're currently the only member to whom I have a contractual obligation to offer non-prejudicial retirement. Doesn't mean I couldn't or _wouldn't_ offer it if someone wanted to leave and I believed it safe, but at the end of five years you alone have the right to _insist_ on it. I wanted you on my team, and the only way they would let me have you was under contract to keep you here, but I refused to force you to do this work without leaving you that out-clause. Having served out the minimal five-year contract they insisted on in lieu of incarceration you _will_ be free to leave with your memories intact."

"I can tell you right now, I won't be leaving." She told him with a shrug. "This isn't just a job to me, and it was never a punishment. It stopped being something you were forcing me to do within the first week."

"Good to know, but that doesn't mean the offer won't remain on the table for you." Jack smiled slightly.

"And for Ianto." She said, raising an eyebrow.

"And for Ianto." He agreed. "I think in his case, he's more than proven his ability to keep secrets in unusual circumstances. I hope he'll return, but all I can really do is make sure he knows he's welcome back."

"He _is_ welcome back." Tosh said, with certainty. "Owen and I more than understand, and for all Gwen doesn't have the same history to draw from she's felt something of a bond with Ianto from the beginning. Welsh fellowship, maybe..."

"Ianto took care of her after what happened with Susie." Jack admitted. "While we were waiting for the two of you to make it in. I was..._indisposed_. He kept her distracted as she recovered from her shock and the retconned memories settled back in, and she's felt a bond with him ever since."

"So, there we are." Tosh nodded her understanding. "We forgive him. Do you?"

"_Yes_." Jack breathed out, dropping his eyes. "I think I'd forgive him worse than this. Much worse. We need him here."

"We need to make sure he understands how much we value him, then." Tosh told him, softly. There was something in her eyes that told him that she knew he'd left off a bit at the end of that admission.

Jack nodded once, sharply, looking over her shoulder through the glass toward the lift. "I intend to make sure of that, personally. I'm going to see him tonight. I need to lay out the options, and discuss things with him. I have a few ideas."

"Are you ready for that?" Tosh asked, with a raised eyebrow. "You can barely meet my eyes, and all you did was bark at me a few times. You held a gun to his head, Jack."

"There are aspects to my reactions last night that you aren't privy to, Tosh." Jack said, quietly. "I think that once we've had a chance to talk things out with a bit more distance, we can get past this. Like I said, I wont force him to come back, but I think I can persuade him that it's the right decision."

"Promise me you'll keep your temper?" Tosh said, pushing the issue.

"I do. I will." Jack said, seriously.

"Then I'll let you get back to brooding on what you're going to say. Word of advice; I would probably limit the innuendo, were I in your place. Whatever the two of you were up to before all this, it's probably best to give that some time." Tosh said, with a tiny rueful smile. She stood, and dragged the chair back into the corner then gave Jack a nod as she left him alone in the office again.

He slumped back in his chair with a sigh, leaning his head back and staring at the ceiling. Jack was beginning to think that his team was even more perceptive than he'd given them credit for. Owen had easily guessed that he and Ianto had been sleeping together, and here Tosh was intimating that she'd noticed Jack's fascination with the Welshman, as well. He already knew Gwen had suspected from the first that there was more going on between he and Ianto than either of them were admitting to, for all he had tried to throw her off the scent with his indiscriminate flirting.

They had both been so sure they were being discreet, but Jack supposed their reactions in the crisis had been the straw that broke the camel's back when it came to outing their arrangement to the others. That would be one more thing to be careful of, if and when Ianto returned. For now, he needed to consider his approach. Much would depend on how he found Ianto, when he got to the young man's flat. How angry the other man still was with him, after the time he'd had to recover. He also needed to consider how he was going to introduce Ianto to the project he intended to give him. He had a couple ideas, but all of them would take preperation in advance, so he might as well stop the brooding his brilliant tech had called him on, and get to it.

He sighed deeply, straightened in his chair and picked up the phone. After a glance through the glass walls of his office to see all three members of his team at their stations, he quickly dialed out on a secured line.

"Helen? Jack, here. Yes, of course. I'm planning to bring someone out to the facility tomorrow, and I just wanted to give you a bit of advance warning. No, not a new resident. I'm bringing one of my team into the loop. Yes, I believe he'll be able to help me keep on top of things a bit better. You know I always feel badly about how much I have to leave on your shoulders out there, when it comes to admin. Well, I think we both know it's not my best area, and Ianto is one of the most organized people I've ever met. Yes. Ianto Jones. Yeah, he's the one I mentioned. I decided to go ahead with the idea. Of course. Alright then, I will see you tomorrow. Right, same to you."

Jack hung up, sighing once again. Whether this was the project that Ianto needed to bring him back from his grief remained to be seen. He had another idea to add to it, but how he would present it depended entirely on what he found when he got to Ianto's flat. There was one place in Cardiff that he knew Ianto would be safe, no matter what he chose to do when offered the options Jack was able to give him. Jack intended to make it non-negotiable, he just hoped his influence on Ianto was still enough to make the order stick.

* * *

><p><em>So, here we are smack in the middle of the post-Cyberwomanpre-Small Worlds interlude. Now you have Jack's personal perspective, helped along by Tosh's own version of a dressing down. Jack really did treat her rather shabbily in this ep. He bit her head off more than once for no real reason other than his temper. He's not particularly surprised that she's upset with him, for all he expected Owen to talk her down. He's not one for apologies, and she didn't expect any, though. There's a bit of a hint of how Tosh is going to move forward with Ianto, personally. I count that deleted scene where she brings Ianto a cup of coffee as canon. Mostly for how adorable, and in character for them both it is. Owen might agree but he isn't the type to go against his reputation to demonstrate it, and Gwen is still too tentative in her relationships with the entire team at this point to push in that direction. Tosh, for all her reticence, is the type to want to do something to demonstrate her forgiveness. Even something so small and simple but absolutely meaningful as that gesture. I am also making it a point to have the entire thing between Jack and Ianto not be quite so well-hidden from the team, for all they aren't going to call them on it under normal circumstances. I don't think they were surprised enough by that kiss in End of Days for it not to have been an open secret that Jack and Ianto had something between them, even if none of them knew exactly what it was. Jack isn't particularly subtle with his interest throughout the show, and Ianto's feelings while much better hidden, weren't impenetrable either. I never really believed the team was so willfully blind that none of them would have figured some things out, even if they didn't call the pair on it._


	8. Chapter 6

_"I won't do it. You can't make me. You like to think you're a hero, but you're the biggest monster of all. "_ **- Ianto Jones, Cyberwoman**

* * *

><p>"Ianto Jones, I never expected you of all people to live in a tip…" Jack Harkness's voice broke the fugue state that Ianto had been in since collapsing on the couch of his single bedroom flat two days earlier. He had only just managed to get his shields back into to a semblance of order, and the last thing he needed was to deal with all the complicated emotions that Captain Jack Harkness brought out in him. Anger, betrayal, fear...he had absolutely loathed Jack at times over the last few days, and yet underneath everything else, he still felt that inexplicable attraction, even <em>affection<em> for the Captain that had made what happened between them inevitable. It was too soon for this. He wasn't ready, but the time had obviously come.

Ianto knew what this visit was. The last words he'd actually spoken to Jack had been an accusation in the heat of the moment, but he had known even as he spoke that they were a lie. Jack wasn't a monster then, and he wasn't one now. This was going to be far more difficult on the Captain than it would be for him. All Ianto had to do was sit here and let it happen, and he was so tired of fighting. His own grief and self disgust were so strong, he just didn't have the strength. He wondered if Gwen would truly be able to pick up the slack the way she seemed to want to, when he was gone. Would she be able to help Jack deal with what he came here to do? Somehow Ianto doubted it. This day was going to live in Jack's memory for some time, before it faded and Ianto found that he was truly sorry for that, but it was too late for apologies.

"What would be the point?" He finally replied, blanking the roiling emotions from his voice. Ianto had learned to do that since joining Torchwood One. It had been even more useful in Cardiff.

"Since the rest of the team seems to think you have some form of OCD, keeping your reputation would be one. Where is your coffee, anyway?"

The rustling noise, and sound of cabinets opening and closing behind him told Ianto where the Captain was, so he sighed.

"I'm immune to Retcon, sir." He said, as expressionlessly as before. "There's no point going through the cabinets for something to put it in."

"Then it's just as well that I didn't bring any with me." Jack said, and Ianto could feel the hurt as much as he could hear it in Jack's voice, and it scared him for reasons he wasn't in any shape to think about. "I know that you're immune. Apparently more-so than even the rare resistant person, like Gwen. Owen was very thorough in the report he made after your first physical. He also said that you were suffering from PTSD, and unspecified mental trauma after Canary Wharf, and he thought that bringing you back into Torchwood was the worst possible thing we could do for you at the time. He's having a very good time singing the 'I told you so' song, as he cleans up his autopsy bay."

"Well, I'm not particularly surprised he's the one who sensed something." Ianto said, allowing at least a slight shading of irony in his tone. Given how badly Ianto shields had eroded over the course of that horrible night, Owen should have picked up on a lot more than Ianto's latent PTSD as he'd examined him before sending him home.

"I should have sensed it."

The regret and self-recrimination pouring off the Captain ate at Ianto's over-sensitized mind, and he dropped his head into his hands to massage his temples, even though he knew the pain he felt wasn't physical. He could not let Jack know what was causing his reactions. He wanted this over with, not to have to go through a question and answer session about his hidden abilities.

"You are absolutely the last person who could or would have sensed it, Captain." He muttered. "I deliberately made very sure of that, and to be completely honest with you, I'd really rather you just get on with what you're here to do, rather than put me through the agony of rehashing it, first."

"Just what exactly is it you think I'm here to do, Ianto?" The Captain's voice was closer now. Directly behind Ianto, and his shoulders tensed, expecting to hear the tell-tale sound of the Webley being cocked.

"I'm immune to Retcon." Ianto repeated, after a tense moment of silent anticipation. "I knew going in to this that there was only one way it would end, if that ending wasn't the one I prayed for."

"I'm not here to kill you, Ianto." The words were quiet, but the emotion behind them made Ianto gasp more than the surprise he felt at hearing them. Wrenching pain that was so strong...Stronger than anything Ianto had ever felt, despite all he'd been through. He had trouble crediting it, as Jack went on. "I think there was one thing you never factored into all your plans._ I'm_ not Yvonne Hartman, and _you're_ not in _London_, anymore. I won't kill you for this. No matter how misguided you may have been, your intentions weren't to commit treason against the Crown, or betray anyone at all."

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Ianto said, with the first emotion he'd shown in the entire conversation. Self-recrimination of his own, that he had to work very hard to keep from projecting. The last thing he and the Captain needed was to get into another self-destructive emotional feedback loop.

"If you believe in that sort of thing."

"I always have." Ianto said, softly. "I believe we create our own hell through our actions in life. I always wondered if Yvonne might have figured it out for herself, in the end. I crossed her path, you know. When I finally got free of the Archives, as I was searching for Lisa."

"How would you have…"

"I _knew_ her." Ianto then quoted, "'I did my duty for Queen and Country.' over and over again. She just stood there, looking at the conversion chambers where her employees were strapped in, dead and dying. She was no threat to me. She still had her soul, and it was in agony. I couldn't even put her out of her misery, because there wasn't an inch of her that wasn't covered in metal. I went back past her, dragging Lisa, and she just watched me go, and stood with the flames overtaking her. She didn't even try to save herself. That's why I think she knew in the end, that she'd created her own hell and resigned herself to facing it. I respected her more in that moment than I did the entire time I worked for her."

"Ianto, Cybermen don't feel misery…"

"Half, possibly _more_ than half of the conversions that day went _wrong_." Ianto interrupted him. "Not all of the conversions were completed, and not all of the ones that _were_ completed were actually completed_ correctly_. I was _there_. You _weren't_. Of the two of us, who is more likely to know the real story of what went on inside that tower, Captain?"

"I can only base my opinion on what I've been told about them, you're right. However, my source is impeccable."

"My source isn't just impeccable, it's unimpeachable." Ianto said roughly.

"Your Lisa can't be considered a reliable source of information..."

"Lisa isn't my source. She was barely conscious when I found her, and her pain was too extreme to let her really understand what was going on around her at that point. They didn't use anesthetic when they sliced and drilled into their _recruits_, Captain. I'm my _own _source. I was uninjured, in full control of my faculties, and senses. I know what I saw, what I felt, what I _experienced_ first hand. The Cybermen were so concerned with fighting the Dalek's that they weren't as in control of the conversion process as they would have been under normal circumstances, and it went wrong more than half the time because of it. After a certain point, they were running out of the metal they needed for full conversions, that's how there could be a half-converted victim like Lisa. They changed their conversion process on the fly, after they realized they needed to overwhelm the Dalek's with numbers. They cut corners, and it cost them in precision. Ask your source exactly what that means, if they're so _impeccable_. See if they have answers for you that are any different from mine."

"I wish I could…" The Captain sighed.

"The Doctor stopped the invasion, and then he left without a word, or lifting a finger to help anyone who managed to survive." Ianto said, coldly, and wasn't surprised when he saw the Captain's head snap toward him in the corner of his eye. "I doubt even _he_ really understood the extent of how completely out of the ordinary the situation was, when it came to the Cybermen, but he also didn't bother to try. I hated him for that, when I heard the full story from a co-worker I had to dig out from under a partially collapsed wall. He'd walked right past her as she lay there being crushed so badly that she couldn't even scream for help, only whisper. It took me some time to come to the conclusion that he probably didn't see her, didn't hear her, didn't even realize there were any survivors, and if he had he probably would have thought we deserved whatever fate we'd made for ourselves. I can't really blame him for that, to be completely honest. Twenty-six people in institutions, and me, and I _begged_ to come back for more. Does that make me saner, or even more mad than the broken ones who can't even face the normal world anymore?"

"You aren't mad, Ianto Jones." The Captain told him, and when Ianto glanced up to meet his eyes, there was a slight smile on his face. "You aren't broken. A bit damaged, some of the shine has rubbed off, and maybe a few parts got a bit bent along the way, but they all still work. That's why I came here today, before I thought you'd have had time to get it into your head that things were entirely hopeless. You have a decision to make. One you made once before, with a lot more reasons than you made clear. As of this moment, you're suspended for a month. At the end of thirty days, you have a decision whether you will come back to work with a clean slate, or take the retirement you were originally offered by the Crown. Yes, I do know that you were offered full retirement, with all benefits, and without prejudice after Canary Wharf. It wasn't in the file I read when you started stalking me for a job, but there were enough discrepancies raised by your ability to do what you've done, so I did some more digging. _You_ were the person who saved what survivors there were, that day. You were the only person physically capable of some of the rescues, and most of the other survivors were clear enough for long enough to name you as the person who got them out. The ones who weren't personally saved by you were saved by the people you saved, as they made their way back down out of the building, so even they're to your credit in the end. You got to meet the Queen, before you came home to Cardiff, Ianto Jones. She tells me you turned down a knighthood for a chance to come work for me, instead."

"Would have drawn too much attention to me, and to Torchwood as a whole…" Ianto muttered, embarrassed to have what he considered a secret exposed. "She was very understanding..."

"I'll say, and so she gave you a substantial financial reward in addition to the hush money and pensions the rest of the survivors were given, instead." The Captain grinned at him. "Which is why I am so entirely surprised to see you living in a tip like this, and brings me right back to my original point. Go get into the shower, and clean yourself up. As lovely as that suit was, three days in it is two too many, and I have something I think you need to see."

"If I'm on suspension, I don't have to take your orders, Captain." Ianto met the other man's eyes, blandly.

"It's not an order, it's a suggestion." The Captain's lips twitched, and he continued. "I think we've established between us that my giving you orders never works out particularly well. That's why I generally make requests of you, instead. But, if you don't go clean up, then you'll be wearing that bedraggled suit to meet some people who might get the wrong idea about you, so it would be in your best interests…"

"I suppose you're going to drag me out of here for whatever you're planning, whether I take that suggestion or not, then?"

"Yep."

"Fine." Ianto rose from the sofa slowly but steadily even after his long bout of inactivity. "But if I'm on suspension I'll be leaving my suits in the closet, and dressing like a normal person again, for once."

"Those jeans you were wearing the night we met would be my preference…" Jack said with a slightly mocking smirk, but Ianto wasn't interested in what had become their normal routine.

"Your preferences aren't my problem, anymore." He said stiffly, and as he strode into the bedroom Jack's still-mocking response followed, for once allowing the Captain the final word.

"Darn."

Nevertheless, when he emerged freshly showered and changed into clothes that fit his age far more than the suits he'd gotten used to, he found himself choosing the same jeans like some sort of Pavlovian response to the Captain's voice.

They didn't fit as well as they had originally, he realized he'd lost weight and conditioning from the stress he'd been under for just over six months, and resolved to do something about that during his suspension. He already knew what his answer to Jack's proposal would be. There was nothing left for Ianto besides Torchwood, but he wasn't ready to give up on his life altogether. He might let the Captain sweat it out a bit, but he'd be returning to the team, and he'd work as hard as he had to hide himself to make up for what he'd done.

* * *

><p>It was late. Ianto knew that the Hub would be empty even before he and Jack made their way in through the underground parking entrance. The Captain still hadn't explained why immediately after suspending Ianto, he had dragged him into work. In fact, the other man hadn't said a word ever since he had given Ianto's choice of clothing a once-over when he emerged from the bedroom at the flat. He'd just nodded toward the door, and held it open as Ianto preceded him out of the flat and downstairs to the SUV. It was taking every ounce of control Ianto believed himself capable of not to display to the Captain just how uncomfortable he was being back within the Hub so soon.<p>

"Forgive me for breaking the ominous silence we've apparently been operating under, but what are we doing here, sir?" Ianto finally asked, as Jack led him across the hub toward Toshiko's work-space. "Shouldn't a suspension preclude my being here at all..."

"Under normal circumstances, that would be the case." Jack finally spoke. He nodded toward Tosh's chair, and Ianto rolled his eyes and took a seat. "I have something I need to go over with you, and this is the only place with the necessary equipment. I'm sorry Ianto, if I could have given you more time to get some perspective before dragging you back here, I would have. I think what I have to tell you about might make a difference, though. Since you're the one sitting in the place of honour, pull up the last six months of Rift readings, and display them as a frequency graph..."

"Alright." Ianto sighed, and spun to do as he'd been asked using Tosh's Rift predictor program. He spread the graph across the three monitors at Tosh's station, then sat back and spun the chair again to face Jack before speaking again. "There, the last six month's readings. What are we looking for?"

"We're looking at the readings. At a pattern that I've done a great deal to disguise from the rest of the team, because I don't think they're ready to learn what I'm about to tell you. You see, the rift here in Cardiff is the only fixed position." Jack explained. "The other end...well...since we can't control our end of the rift we have no way of mapping all the other points. Apparently the planet the Weevils come from is a regular stop on what seems to be a rotation on the other terminus, but things come in from all over the universe. Other places, other times, there are infinite combinations, and the only fixed terminus is here in Cardiff. There are a few places and times that the other end of the rift seems drawn to more often, the Weevil's planet for example, but that doesn't mean they're stable. On top of that, things can arrive here a hundred years or more on either side of where they started out. Following me so far?"

"Yes." Ianto said, shortly. "I knew all of this already…"

"OK, then lets get straight to the new information." Jack said, without rancor for Ianto's obvious impatience. "The rift in Cardiff isn't a _one-way_ terminus."

"Not a one-way…" Ianto's eyes widened as he immediately made the connection. "_Jesus_… you mean…"

"The rift _takes_ as well as gives." Jack met his eyes squarely, and Ianto stared at the Captain in utter shock.

"_People_ have been taken…"

"Not just people." Jack told him. "Objects, animals…but yes, people have been taken. Look here…" Jack spun Ianto's chair around to face the monitors, and with the press of a few buttons, zoomed in on the rift readings displayed on Tosh's computers. "You can easily see all the positive rift spikes. The ones where a flare comes up and drops something off here in Cardiff. But look here." Jack zoomed in again, and pointed to a small nearly unnoticeable spike that showed below the line of what they had always believed to be normal rift energy. "That's from this morning. Right then, at that very moment, something was taken. In this case, it was actually an inanimate object. A street-light, as a matter of fact. I got the notification on my wrist-strap, checked the CCTV and it disappeared from one frame ot the next. Didn't need to go out and do anymore checking for that one."

"And there's no way to predict them, is there…" Ianto sighed. it wasn't a question, and he didn't really need the Captain's negative head-shake in reply. "Why are you telling me, then? What's the point?"

"Because sometimes, the rift gives back what it takes." Jack told him, solemnly. Then, leaning over Ianto to reach the keyboard again, he pulled up a file from twenty years before, and nodded his head at it for Ianto to read.

The report detailed an electric streetlamp of a style not in use within Cardiff at the time, that had appeared randomly in the roof of a warehouse. it had fallen from the roof, and struck a bystander, breaking the neck of the man and killing him. Torchwood had arranged for the incident to be covered up as a construction accident and the man's family compensated by the city council. The lamp-post had been taken into Torchwood inventory, and now that he read the report Ianto could remember being curious about the damaged and dusty streetlamp that sat in a corner of one of the non-secured archive rooms that he hadn't yet gotten around to organizing. It had never occurred to him that the streetlamp matched the new ones the city council was so enthusiastically placing around Cardiff in the past year, replacing the older less attractive models that had lit the city's streets for several decades. Rusted, dented, damaged beyond usefulness, the style was exactly the same but it looked as if it had been through a war rather than a jump through time.

"The lamp in the archives?" Ianto said, glancing up at Jack.

"The very same." The Captain nodded.

"It didn't just jump through time twenty years, did it?" Ianto asked, again not really needing to have his guess confirmed. He knew he was right from it's condition.

"No, it probably went to a place where it was damaged by the elements. No way of telling for how long. it's one of the newer ones. Been placed in the last month or so, and it's been stored in a dry room all this time, so it didn't rust up and get damaged there. it's in basically the same condition it was found in, as per the report."

"So, one can assume that if inanimate objects are returned, however outside their own time, then animate ones can be returned as well?" Ianto said.

"Correct." Now, Jack's expression grew very grave. "When I took over, I found two people in the lowest level of cells. They had been mentally and physically damaged, and there was no way they would have survived in the outside world, but they weren't cared for beyond basic needs. They were prisoners of Torchwood, treated like criminals or aliens. When I searched the records to find out why, I found that they'd been taken and returned by the rift before they were originally taken. Within their own lifetime, but deposited in their own past by as little as six months and as much as thirty years. That seems to happen more often than someone being taken and dropped into their own future, but it's not a hard and fast rule. I discovered that it was a rare, but recurring circumstance which Cardiff's leadership had been hiding for over a century. Rather than treating them like victims, they had been hiding them down there until they died."

"God…" Ianto closed his eyes, and tried very hard not to imagine what that must have been like for the victims.

"Yeah…" Jack agreed. "So rather than continue that disgusting tradition, I did my best to find some way to care for them, instead. At first, I tried to care for them on my own, but I really was alone here. I hadn't even brought Susie in at that time, so I was constantly in and out of the hub trying to keep a handle on things, and one of them was able to kill himself during one of my absences, and then shortly afterward two more victims appeared who both required extensive care that I wasn't knowledgeable enough to give them, and I lost both of them shortly after their arrival. I realized that I just wasn't equipped to manage, so I set up a place where the rift victims who absolutely cannot reenter society could be cared for." Jack again leaned over Ianto and tapped more keys on the computer, bringing up a map of Wales, then zoomed in on Flat Holm island. Ianto knew of the former munitions bunkers, but had understood the island to be abandoned except for a lighthouse to keep ships from running around on it in the Channel.

"Flat Holm…" He said, and turned to look back up at Jack. "You turned the old bunkers from the war into…what? A private asylum?"

"Yes." Jack said, and smiled slightly. Ruefully. "I tell the caregivers that the victims were part of scientific experiments that went wrong, or government employees who were caught up in accidents. Most of them know better after a short time there, but they go along with the fiction in order to be able to continue helping them. Ianto…the team doesn't know. I don't think any of them would understand. I help the ones who _can_ reintegrate to do it safely, but some of them…they can't be saved. They're taken, tossed like driftwood through time and space by the rift, and in most cases they aren't just damaged physically and mentally, they're somehow changed in ways we can't even understand much less treat. They're lost forever. Even when they come back. All we can do is care for them as best we can."

"Is this intended to be some sort of object lesson…" Ianto narrowed his eyes, glaring at Jack. "Do you think showing me this…"

"No!" Jack interrupted him. "_No_, Ianto… That's not what this is about. Yes, I think your experience with…with _Lisa_ will help you understand in a way the others won't, but it's not meant to teach you anything except that I believe you have the capacity to understand the situation enough to help me, when the others can't. You told me once that Gwen saw you as the person who cares. That seeing that in you was closer than any of the rest of us had come to the reason you're here. Well, that's exactly what I need. Help me _care_ for them."

"You want me to...help you with the _victims_?" Ianto stared at Jack, feeling the honest desire for Ianto's help with what he had been dealing with alone for so long. "_How_?"

"I have just as much trouble dealing with the administrative details of Flat Holm as I do the ones here, Ianto. I can do it, but you and I both know it isn't my area of expertise. I have the funding situation set up, but I barely ever have time to adjust it according to the demands of the situation. The island can't help but generate a paper-trail that I don't have the time to deal with as often as I should. I also hate going there and seeing them, knowing there's nothing I can do to change things for them. Most of the times I would disappear for most of the day and come back with no explanation for why I needed you to distract me were because I'd had to make a visit to the island for one reason or another. I need someone to take over the administrative details; someone who can go and liaise with the head nurse and make sure she has what she needs to care for them. You are the most organized person I know, and you've been through something that makes me believe you will be able to handle this better than anyone else I can even imagine. Certainly better than the rest of the team..."

"Owen would go mad trying to come up with a way to fix them..." Ianto said, quietly. "Tosh would be just as bad trying to come up with a way to predict the events and stop them, and _Gwen_..."

"It would break her heart, and possibly her sanity along the way..." Jack agreed. "She is in no way ready for what she would find. I can conceivably see Owen and Tosh managing somehow, but I can't see them being able to keep the secret entirely from her until she's possibly ready to deal with it."

"While I have more than proven my ability to keep things secret from the entire team..." Ianto finished ironically.

"You don't have to do this, Ianto." Jack told him, seriously. "I won't force you; it isn't intended as a punishment. You also haven't given me a decision about staying with the team, and I really don't want you to until you've had more time to think things through. I just wanted this to be a part of your decision making process. I wanted you to know that despite what you think, we do have a great need for you here. I have a need for you far above and beyond what I thought I'd already demonstrated. I am not just offering this to you because of what's happened. I had been considering it for several weeks, and had already discussed bringing you in with the head nurse on the island before any of this week's events. No matter what you decide, I can't take away your knowledge of the situation, and I'm sorry for dumping this on you without you having that choice, but..."

"I wouldn't want you to Retcon the knowledge, sir." Jack interrupted. "Not under any circumstances, if for no other reason than because it gives you someone to unburden yourself to."

"You really don't have to..."

"Jack..." Ianto interrupted him again, shaking his head and meeting the Captain's eyes steadily. "You've done something very important, for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do, despite the obvious emotional discomfort it causes you. I wouldn't like to consider myself the kind of person who could turn away from that, even if I wouldn't know any differently. Not that it's a possibility, but the sentiment remains. Besides, I made my choice before I ever left my living room, this evening. I can't leave. I'm not ready to say I've been defeated by Torchwood. So, this changes nothing, except to give me further reason to stay."

A previously absent light seemed to rekindle in the Captain's eyes with Ianto's words, not much more than a spark, but still noticeable to someone with Ianto's abilities. The hope and relief that Jack felt came at Ianto in invisible waves, but he held his expression steadily calm, deliberately radiating nothing in return. The effort was almost enough to collapse his shields again under the strain he still felt internally, but the emotions coming from the Captain were so overwhelmingly positive that it somehow did more to shore up Ianto's strength than erode it. That surprised him, because the positivity or negativity of others' emotions had never before had any affect on Ianto's abilities unless he was deliberately using someone as an emotional anchor with or without their cooperation, and when he had the free time and solitude to consider it he knew he was going to need to give the fact that it was happening with Jack without any effort on either of their parts a great deal of thought.

"Are you feeling up to a visit to the Island tonight, or would you prefer to take more time?" The Captain asked, interrupting Ianto's thoughts.

"I think I'd prefer more time, first..." Ianto admitted. "I'm still...coming to terms. I think I'm more in need of a distraction right now than such a rather unfortunate reminder."

"I may have a solution to that, as well." The Captain told him, slowly. "Going back to my poor impression of that flat you've been living in, I happen to have another option for you..."

"What, you want me to move flats?" Ianto asked, surprised.

"Yes, and I'm afraid this is more of an order than a suggestion, despite my earlier disclaimer about giving you orders."

"I've already agreed to come back after my suspension, I assumed it would be implied that I intend to follow your orders..." Ianto reminded him. "I just can't understand why you would want to order me to move house..."

"Well, I intended to make this my final nonnegotiable order if you chose to leave us, or my first new potentially negotiable order were you to choose to stay." Jack explained. "I would like you to move into a building that has a very special purpose, both for your own safety and for my peace of mind. It's someplace that I have a very particular connection to, and the ability to monitor your movements. Were you to have chosen retirement, it would have allowed me to keep tabs on you without interfering in your life. Your decision to stay just opens up other, far more palatable options. I don't think the move will be a hardship, in fact I'm fairly certain you'll find yourself very pleased with it, if you give it a chance..."

Ianto's brows drew together in thought as he stared at the Captain's earnest expression. The emotions the Captain was radiating were anticipation, and...hopefulness. Jack really wanted Ianto to agree to this, and it made him curious as to what could be so special about this building. Curious enough to agree.

"Alright, show me." Ianto said, abruptly. "I'll agree to go to the island at the weekend, and we can check out this flat you want me to move into, tonight. I don't agree to move in sight unseen, but I will keep an open mind..."

"Well, you're certainly going to need _that_..." Jack replied, and when Ianto looked at him in question he only shrugged, and gestured toward the exit. Ianto sighed in annoyance, rolling his eyes, and stood, preceding the Captain out of the Hub.

* * *

><p><em>For all that it's taken so long to get to this point, I still feel somehow as if I've rushed this chapter... Ianto is just as hard for your interpid author to read as he seems to be for Jack. Or at least, that's how he seems to want to come out on proverbial paper. Even when I'm in his head writing him, he is maddeningly hard to get a handle on at this point in the story. It's not that I don't know how he's feeling and what he's thinking, it's just that when I try to illustrate it I find myself holding back from making him as transparent as the thoughts of the other POV characters. I think maybe what's happening is that I really am in his head, it just isn't as simple as it is with the other characters. He isn't just holding back with everyone around him, he's holding back from himself, and therefore me as the author. Yes, I realize I'm ascribing personal motives to a fictional character, but what author doesn't? The problem isn't that he's not transparent enough, it's that it is very difficult to be truthful to that and still feel as if I'm giving the reader a complete picture of where he is actually coming from in the way an author normally does in this point of view.<em>

_Rereading this chapter again before posting it, I find myself less bothered by Ianto's lack of transparency now than I was when I decided to take a few days after completing it, and the above author's note. It took rereading future chapters that are already completed, so if anyone else is feeling the same way, you might have to wait for me to get back to that point in the story before things become more clear in Ianto's head. Sorry for that, I'm going to shamelessly claim author's perogative. So, yes. Ianto Jones is hard even for himself to read, at this point. Things, even in his own mind, are so unsettled that he can't really find true balance in his own emotions, and even he doesn't know why. So for him, it shows as a return to a level of stoicism that doesn't even allow him to feel his own emotions entirely, much less convey them to others. He's hiding again, even from himself. Don't worry, regular applications of Jack Harkness have a tendency to cure that particular problem, we just aren't quite there yet._


End file.
